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

    Oh, the nightly above also crashes if I turn the TV off. (Discovered by chance the first time, tried it again - simply had LE sitting idle, turned the TV off then on again after a few seconds - and sure enough, no signal to the TV.)

    I got myself a Raspberry Pi 5 (4 GiB) instead and after using it for a couple of hours I'm cautiously optimistic that the third time's the charm! It has played all formats I've thrown at it flawlessly so far, including 1440p@50Hz VP9 (using roughly 50 % of all cores doing so). Besides actually working, it's much snappier in the menus and boots faster than the ROCK64.

    Edit: BTW, I'm using a FLIRC case with the plastic top removed (it's snapped in place and can be easily removed - and put back again). The case gets warm but not excessively so while playing that 1440p@50Hz VP9 video mentioned above. I'm guessing about 45 °C.

    Edited 2 times, last by arvidb (January 18, 2024 at 6:14 AM).

    In some ways RPi5 is a blunt instrument; throw CPU at the codec problem and make things work. However it has enough CPU to pull that off, and I've come to view this as a rather shrewd design decision. It normally takes man-years of effort to develop and maintain hardware codecs and RPi5 simply passes the buck to ffmpeg for software processing.

    Quote from chewitt

    In some ways RPi5 is a blunt instrument; throw CPU at the codec problem and make things work. However it has enough CPU to pull that off, and I've come to view this as a rather shrewd design decision. It normally takes man-years of effort to develop and maintain hardware codecs and RPi5 simply passes the buck to ffmpeg for software processing.

    I agree, I was initially a bit miffed that it only supported HEVC/H.265 hardware decoding (as most of my video collection is ~1080p AVC/H.264), but after using it in the real world it's just far better than the RPi4 overall, and generally a non-issue.

    Only thing I've found it won't play well is VP9 Profile 2 4k60 test files (it'll definitely cry those in), but for most >4k30 it's fine.

    Samples - Official Kodi Wiki