No ethernet support on Orange Pi 3 LTS?

I was very excited when my Orange Pi 3 arrived today. I downloaded the LE image for it, fired it up, and was hugely disappointed and confused when the Ethernet port wouldn't work.

Once again I've been burned by my lack of attention to details. The OP 3 i bought is the "LTS" version, which i quickly realized from this forum does not have working ethernet with LE yet.

It seems that jernej is working on adding phy ethernet support for LTS eventually, so all is not lost. Considering the low cost and high availability of this compared to a RPI4, its going to be a great alternative for h265 videos.

Any update on how close jernej is to completing the update? Thanks.

Quote from deleonkikko

gadget_guy Welcome to the club of LTS purchased for Libreelec and cannot be used.

I don't like this club

Its actually not bad though, I just plugged in an old USB-ethernet dongle I had lying around and it works fine through that!

So now my OP3LTS is able to watch h265 videos from my NAS just as good as my RaspberryP4. But it only cost me a quarter of what a RPI4 is going for these days, and it has eMMC to boot (pun?).

Quote from deleonkikko

gadget_guy are you talking about an ethernet adapter through usb or a wifi adapter???

its not wifi, its a hardwired RJ45 Ethernet to USB adapter. 100Mbps, USB2.0. Exact model is 9300-USBEL. its at least 10 years old

Quote from deleonkikko

maybe with a gigabit adapter connected to the 3.0 port you can get over 300 or 400Mb/s

do you really need that much speed? Even playing a 4k video my NAS wasn't sending data out any faster than 40mb/ (peak) and usually only around 10mb/s.

but I don't use any streaming services, do those require faster throughput?

Jernej, you are the man!

I tried the nightly, and it worked perfect!

• installed to the onboard emmc
• Onboard Ethernet port is working
• plays H265 4K vids from my NAS with no problem

Thank you!