What SBC for 1440p@60Hz H.265 & VP9? (Looking at e.g. ROCK64 - any experiences to share?)

Hi,

I've run LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 2 for many years now, controlled with my TV remote over CEC, and it's been great! However I'm starting to collect more and more H.265 videos, and even some 1440p@60Hz H.265 and VP9 ones, so it's time for an upgrade. I assumed this would be easy now in 2023, but I am actually having a hard time:

• Raspberry Pi 4: does not support VP9 HW decode.
• Orange Pi 3 LTS: severe issues with CEC.
• Odroid C4: I actually got myself one of these, but besides the fact that my board seems to have hardware issues, I was disappointed to realise that H.265 and VP9 decoding does not work under LibreELEC (and 1080p H.264 stutters out-of-the-box), and even "bleeding edge" nightly CoreELEC-21 is using an old 4.9 linux kernel since apparently there is no manufacturer mainline support for the Amlogic chips at all. So this is going back for a refund.
• Radxa Rock 4[A+][B+] - ridiculously expensive (esp. incl. case) - also I've not even been able to find the specific models listed as supported in the download section, only the non-plus A&B variants.

Now I'm looking at Pine64 ROCK64 - but I'm having difficulty finding up-to-date info and experiences. Also, the facts that it's from 2017 and that there are no(?) EU sources makes be a bit hesitant. Does anyone have current experience running LibreELEC on the ROCK64, and if so can you tell me if it can play H.265 files flawlessly? What about 1440p@60Hz videos? What about VP9? Any other issues, like stuttering, or CEC not working?

Is there any other board that fits better given my requirements?

Thanks!

Cool - thanks!

The "community build"? Is that different from the standard build available via the official download page? If so, where can I find it?

Thanks, chewitt!

One example of 1440p@60Hz VP9 that I'd like to be able to watch (downscaled to 1080p; I use the 1440p stream since the YouTube 1080p streams have compression artifacts due to too low bitrate): RailCowGirl (downloaded using yt-dlp -f '308+251'

Given that it's a cab ride in a locomotive any stuttering is very visible and completely ruins the experience. Can the RPi4 handle it perfectly? Otherwise it's no better for me than the RPi2 I've already got.

Quote from chewitt

Odroid C4 should similarly support everything software decoded up to 1080p; upstream Linux support for everything except the media bits is solid and quite mature now. You might need to disable hardware decoding completely to solve the H264 issue; the current H264 support in the upstream kernel uses the VDEC driver for GXBB/GXL/GXM boards. Newer G12A/B and SM1 boards need to use the newer (and badly named) HEVC driver that supports H264, HEVC and VP9 codecs and there's an issue with 10-bit/4K media. After a multi-year wait someone is currently known to be working on a sponsored rewrite of the HEVC driver .. although I didn't see code to test yet.

LibreELEC 11.0.3 out of the box does not decode 1080p@25Hz H.265 on the Odroid C4. (It plays audio but shows a frozen image of the file selection menu.) If I turn off "Allow hardware acceleration with DRM PRIME" the result is the same. If I turn off "Allow using DRM PRIME decoder" the video is decoded but it's very jerky, not watchable. LibreELEC says "Video decoder: ff-hevc (SW)", "Pixel format: yuv420p10le", "Video stream: 1,920x1,080p, 1.78 AR, 25.000 FPS" here.

Unfortunately I think the link to this file will only work in Sweden. yt-dlp -F says it's hvc1.2.4.L123 3539kbit/s (format ID "hls-cmaf-full-3539-1").

First impressions with the ROCK64:

With the current official release (LE11), I get no picture at all.

With the old release (LE10), the board boots into 1024x768@60 Hz. CEC does not work.

This is using a Sony full-HD TV (KDL-32CX523) where HDMI works fine with LibreELEC on RPi2 and Odroid C4, and with various "full-size" computers.

Any ideas?

Ok so I tried a different HDMI cable, a Deltaco "HDMI Premium certified cable"/"HDMI High Speed with Ethernet"/"4K UHD 60 Hz" one, and now things seem to work on both LE11 and LE10. Including CEC.

First glance: 1080p@25 Hz H.264 and H.265 looks flawless (and skipping is much faster than with the RPi2 I used before!). Even 1440p@50 Hz scaled to my TV's 1080p resolution looks great! (Again at first glance.)

I have not. I almost haven't tried the official version yet. If the official version does everything I want it to I'm not sure why I would try the community version. We'll see.

It's great to know that the community edition exists as an additional option, for sure! Thanks!

Just as a heads-up to prospective buyers of the ROCK64: there seems to be a serious audio issue with ROCK64 under LE11. I haven't really had time to look into it much (I kinda gave up on upgrading the LibreELEC experience, at least for a while), but what happens is the audio starts to skip back and forth a few 10ths of a second after playing a video for a while. Seems to happen regardless of video format, and it makes speech unintelligible and music unlistenable.

I tried changing some settings to no avail. Enabling resampling makes it sound like a really out-of-whack vinyl player though. That was fun, for a while!

Perhaps it's fixed in the community version? That's on my list of possible things to try. I also read a post here where someone had audio sync issues when streaming from NAS for some reason, which is what I'm doing too. So that's something else to explore. If/when I find the time...

I had a little bit of time now to try the latest nightly (https://test.libreelec.tv/12.0/Rockchip/…a-rock64.img.gz).

The issue remains: after a while (usually about 15 minutes, but it varies randomly and perhaps depending on source file; it can be just a few seconds or perhaps 30 minutes sometimes) the audio starts skipping/popping/crackling and the video starts to judder (very noticeably; it's not subtle). This seems to happen regardless of source resolution (1080p/1440p), frame rate (25/50/60 Hz), and format (H.264, HEVC, VP9).

This is with "Settings -> Player -> Videos -> Adjust display refresh rate" set to "On start/stop" and "Sync playback to display" enabled.

Unfortunately it makes the ROCK64 unusable as a HTPC for me.