Orange Pi PC2(H5) HEVC Problem

  • Hi all,

    Just installed 10.02 on a board i had lying around and finally decided to make something of it.

    In general it was a pretty starightforward ane easy process, but i have run into some problem with HEVC files.

    Namely with DRM Prime on , i get no video from HEVC files but only sound. Turning it off, HEVC plays fine but only 720p, 1080 is very choppy(i would assume because its doing SW and cpu can do so much).

    So is this normal for an H5 board and its where H5 development currently is at, or its something on my side that could be alleviated somehow?

  • DRM Prime

    I guess Amazon Prime? Note that if Widevine (or basically any other) DRM plugin is used, video is always decoded on CPU. Cortex A53 cores are just not designed for that task. Because of that, being able to play only 720p HEVC sounds about right. Another part of your problem is that 10-bit HEVC stream was selected. This is not supported by HW in any form, even rendering it via "direct to plane" method selected by default. Kodi doesn't yet know to fallback to GPU rendering in such cases. If you select GPU rendering in settings, video will be there, but due many inefficiencies in decoding and rendering process, it will most likely be slideshow.

  • Oh i thought thats just the name of the decoder(DRM Prime) , and not realated to Amazon. Today i learned :). Im having the issue with hevc files with no drm, so it needs to be turned off for any hevc to work.

    As for the second part of your reply, since i have no way to tell if the 1080p hevc file i want to play is 10bit, i figure im out of luck and should stick to 720p hevc with my current hardware?

    If i understood correctly and that is the case, would a Orange Pi 3 with H6 be powerfull enough to play those 10bit 1080p HEVC files at full speed with LE?

  • Oh i thought thats just the name of the decoder(DRM Prime) , and not realated to Amazon. Today i learned :).

    Ah, sorry, brainfart on my side. DRM prime is really a decoding method, you're right :)

    Anyway, I'm pretty sure you tried to watch 10-bit HEVC and H5 doesn't have appropriate core neither to HW decode nor HW render it. H6 does, so it will be very low CPU utilization.

    You can use mediainfo addon, which shows basic information about video file.

  • You can use mediainfo addon, which shows basic information about video file.

    Too much hassle to check files before playing, and they are hosted on remote location(cloud) with multiple versions of same file, which complicates things too much.

    I suppose ill either exclude hevc alltogether, or best case go for a PI3.

    Thank you for your replies, much appreciated.

    Cheers

  • Pi3 doesn't decode HEVC in HW, it just have extremely optimized SW decoding, but only in LE9.2 and lower, not LE10. I'm not sure what is 10-bit HEVC performance.

  • Pi3 doesn't decode HEVC in HW

    I assume this is regarding raspberry Pi3?

    As i had Orange Pi3 in mind which has a H6 CPU, for which you mentioned above it does HW.

    I'm pretty sure you tried to watch 10-bit HEVC and H5 doesn't have appropriate core neither to HW decode nor HW render it. H6 does, so it will be very low CPU utilization.