Rock PI 4B, hardware accelerated video decoding in another OS

  • Hi all,

    I have a Rock PI 4B, and I've got great 4K video playback with LE 10.0.1, so thanks a lot for that! Unfortunately I wasn't able to achieve good video playback in any other distro that I tried. In an attempt to have good video playback in another distro, I began looking into LibreELEC repo to see what magic is being done.

    I noticed that LE relies heavily on patches and uses very specific versions of packages. I started by downloading the version of FFmpeg specified in the package.mk file, applied the relevant ffmpeg patches but wasn't able to finish the compilation because in my setup I didn't have the patches that LE applies to linux itself (and these involve crucial components like rkvdec, hantro, rockchip DRM, etc).

    So my question is: Would it be possible for me to get all these needed patches applied in another distro (like armbian, dietpi or manjaro-arm)? How? Is there a tool could I use for that?

    Thank you!

  • All the kernel + ffmpeg + kodi patches LE is using are either in the LE repo or the sources URL is clearly listed in package.mk files. In theory there is nothing to stop you replicating the LE experience elsewhere; although note that most Desktop distros are running Kodi via Xorg or Wayland which will create some limiations.

    I'm not aware of any "download all the LE stuff for <distro>" tools, but our sources are all in our repo so feel free to write one :)