Which board to play 1080p x265 and available

pierrepoulpe · December 5, 2022 at 5:44 PM

Hello,

I need to install a new system (currently using a laptop, but the 10m cable is dead, and instead of buying a new one I was thinking of installing a rpi like board close the videoprojector).

Problem, impossible to buy a rpi4, which sounds like the most straightforward choice, and for an undefined time.

What is the second best choice : small, low power, not too expensive, with Wifi and HDMI output, working out of the box with LE, to play 1080p x265/x264 files?

I was looking around Orange Pi 3 LTS, but I saw on an other thread that wifi chip is not supported...

Any other idea?

Thanks,

**chewitt** · December 7, 2022 at 12:42 PM

The "not too expensive" requirement is a challenge these days; any recent NUC device or x86_64 equivalent with an integrated Intel GPU would be fine. Perhaps just keep an eye on https://rpilocator.com/? for stocks appearing somewhere.

MatteN · December 7, 2022 at 1:28 PM

I have a Tinker Board S with LE 20 nightly installed on emmc, it plays 4k 30p HEVC

and a Banana Pi M5 with CE 20 nightly installed on emmc, it plays 4k 60p HDR HEVC.

petediscrete · December 7, 2022 at 3:53 PM

Rock64 and RockPro64 are quite impressive. Hardware acceleration all the way up to HEVC. Wi-Fi works with external dongle. I bought five of each from a guy on one of the forums a couple of years ago for a good price too. Must have been foresight of what was to come.

**jernej** · December 7, 2022 at 4:40 PM

Quote from pierrepoulpe

Orange Pi 3 LTS

While I have it on my desk, I didn't add support for it just yet in LE. It needs Ethernet PHY driver and wifi is totally unsupported by mainline Linux. I plan to add PHY driver, but no for wifi.

H6 (SoC on OPi 3 LTS) has solid support in LE. Missing features are analog audio output (I have wip driver for that, but no time to fix minor issues) and 10-bit display pipeline. This means that 10-bit HEVC videos are correctly decoded but they are displayed as 8-bit, so some banding can be visible in HDR output.

pierrepoulpe · January 2, 2023 at 9:54 AM

Hello, thanks for your replies. I've been busy last weeks... rpi4 definitely unavailable, to the point I find it second hand twice more expensive than the official price for new.

The question was not that easy, with your propositions, if I take in consideration availability and wifi, and price... none completely fits.

Well, I finally took the risk with a orangepi3 lts, 55€ with power supply and shipping. While LE is not supported, I was planning to rely the onboard android 9, and maybe stick on that.

I received it, maybe not the good place to talk about that as I don't use LE in the end, but.... :

Onboard android 9 doesn't come with any store, so installing kodi is not as simple as click install on google's play store. Got the APK, it get installed, but never start.

orangepi supplies an image of debian 11 with preinstalled kodi... :

... and some undocumented tricks : It works really fine, actually I've been able to play a 2160p video that a core i3 pc was not able to play. (I did try to install kodi on an other ubuntu image and didn't get the same result....)

I just had to setup kodi as a standalone service, and it does the job. Wifi is working, BT also (a bit tricky to pair though)

I'd really like to switch back to LE in the future, I love the simplicity and the lightweigth, but my plan is to stick to Wifi for internet connection, and if it works fine, BT for sound, so that I have no more cables between the videoprojector and hifi amp....

Wifi/BT must be somewhere in there : https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong

I have no idea about the amount of job to integrate that in LE. If I had spare time I may look deeper into it...

**jernej** · January 2, 2023 at 3:15 PM

pierrepoulpe please check RE: Nightly images for A64, H3, H5, H6 and R40 boards

pierrepoulpe · January 3, 2023 at 5:46 PM

wow, absolutely wonderful! I tried it, had some issues. I post my feedbacks on the dedicated thread....