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

arvidb · January 7, 2024 at 7:04 AM

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.)

arvidb · January 18, 2024 at 5:17 AM

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.

**chewitt** · January 18, 2024 at 10:19 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.

powerarmour · January 18, 2024 at 4:23 PM

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

**chewitt** · January 18, 2024 at 5:32 PM

Yup, 4K@59.94/60 media is beyond CPU decoding unless having a very low bitrate. Up to 4K30 is normally fine though.

kapqa · August 17, 2024 at 6:56 PM

have Rock64 and RaspberryPi3 test with Libreelec 11 for Netflix Plugin which uses VP9 for 1080P stream<

both device struggle with playback, lagging, but Rock64 bit better playback, however, it seeems that there is more issue on rock64 with Netflix add-on, very many issues with different titles, could be issue with my configuration,

or effectively the Netflix add-on by castagna function better on Raspberry<

hoping to upgrade to RockPro64 in the future, but if there could be similar issue, with playback, maybe CM4 module for Raspberry could be better option (and afterwards swap for CM5 module?) for VP9 + Netflixaddon with LibreElec.

Besides Netflix, Rock64 superior to RP3, with the exception of some stream if you have hardware keys from Raspberry Foundatoin *like VC1 if not mistaken.

EDIT: the Rock64 plays sighnificantly better, my apologies, the VP9, when it plays (the Netflix stream).