Is the Rock64 right for my requirements?

  • I'm currently on a Raspberry Pi 3 running LibreELEC.

    The main issue I'm facing with the Pi is the lack of 10-bit 1080p HEVC support. I assume the Rock64 running LE supports this, because I'm not completely sure?

    Also, although I don't have a 4K TV now, I'd like to know the extent of 4K and HDR support for future proofing. Will it support 4K 10-bit HEVC HDR content?

    And how much RAM will I need? Will 1GB RAM be enough for 4K HDR playback? What about 1080p?

    Edited once, last by Monie (January 1, 2019 at 4:30 AM).

  • I'm currently on a Raspberry Pi 3 running LibreELEC.

    The main issue I'm facing with the Pi is the lack of 10-bit 1080p HEVC support. I assume the Rock64 running LE supports this, because I'm not completely sure?

    Also, although I don't have a 4K TV now, I'd like to know the extent of 4K and HDR support for future proofing. Will it support 4K 10-bit HEVC HDR content?

    And how much RAM will I need? Will 1GB RAM be enough for 4K HDR playback? What about 1080p?

    10-bit HEVC works in LE but not in Android as Pine uses very ancient Android firmware.

    HDR10 and HLG HDR works but not HDR10+ or Dolby Vision.

    1GB RAM is enough for LE for 4K as it uses less than 300MB RAM.

    1080p works fine.

  • 10-bit HEVC works in LE but not in Android as Pine uses very ancient Android firmware.

    HDR10 and HLG HDR works but not HDR10+ or Dolby Vision.

    1GB RAM is enough for LE for 4K as it uses less than 300MB RAM.

    1080p works fine.

    Awesome.

    If I run into issues with LE (as it's in alpha), I was actually planning to use ayufan's 7.1 nougat android tv build, as this seems to be the most popular on the Pine64 forums. I assume this should have no problems running 10-bit HEVC?

  • Awesome.

    If I run into issues with LE (as it's in alpha), I was actually planning to use ayufan's 7.1 nougat android tv build, as this seems to be the most popular on the Pine64 forums. I assume this should have no problems running 10-bit HEVC?

    10-bit H265 doesn't work in any Pine Android firmware as their firmware uses code older than Sep 2017 and 10-bit was only added by Rockchip in Feb 2018. It seems they completely abandoned Android, so only Armbian and LE is useful on such a device.

    Maybe MXPlayer can still play it in Android, not sure.

  • Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ with a little overclock and LE 9.0 firmware handle software decoding of lower bitrate 1080p HEVC files quite well. Higher bitrates and media that's also DRM encrypted (Netflix etc.) will push things over the edge, but the Pi Foundation Engineers have been quite resourceful at finding spare compute resources on the board and putting everything to work.

  • That's not possible? Raspberry Pi simple don't have hardware acceleration for 10 bits, 720p low-bitrate maybe, but 1080p?

    Recent optimisations of HEVC CPU+GPU decoding on the Pi have done pretty amazing things. 1080p content is playing now - though not all.

  • Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ with a little overclock and LE 9.0 firmware handle software decoding of lower bitrate 1080p HEVC files quite well. Higher bitrates and media that's also DRM encrypted (Netflix etc.) will push things over the edge, but the Pi Foundation Engineers have been quite resourceful at finding spare compute resources on the board and putting everything to work.

    I do not have that much stage knowledge, but "a little" is how much? 1.4 GHz is 3b+, which already OC (like Athenon Black Edition, am i right?), so 1.5 GHz? 1.6 GHz?

    I'm truly suprised at amount of optimization required for software decoding of 10bits video

  • I do not have that much stage knowledge, but "a little" is how much? 1.4 GHz is 3b+, which already OC (like Athenon Black Edition, am i right?), so 1.5 GHz? 1.6 GHz?

    As much as it will handle. Also, gpu_freq and sdram_freq are just as important as arm_freq.

  • Yeah in my case what was ultimately the Pi's undoing as a HTPC box is that it would work fine 80% of the time but, that other 20% it would get thrown some curveball format (my tv is 720p, i don't care about quality at all i just need it to decode in real time) like 10bit hevc i didn't always have control over, and my only choice would be to convert it down to h264. And if I'm going to do that, i might as well use my phone since it can decode h264 just as well. And that's exactly what i ended up doing, I just reencode everything in hevc to 264, put it all in the cloud stream to my browser everything fine no need for pi.

    So anything that can handle these newfangled off the wall formats for television technology i will never own piques my interest *old man shakes fist at codecs*

    Hey believe me i understand the power of hdr in fact i saw a quite impressive demo of an actual HDR monitor at siggraph 2003 and spent the next 10+ years wondering whatever happened to it, but i don't have much control over what Google or Netflix wants to send down the pipe and in Google's case it's almost always hevc and opus, the opus part is great it's wayyyy better than any other lossy audio codec but my cheap/ancient hardware (not to mention, browsers that won't play the other company's preferred format) does not abide the video! With the exception of course of my Google ® Pixel ™ with Patented Qualcomm® Broacom® idgaf but i sure as s— don't have access to it as a developer HEVC™ decoding technology