Question regarding H618 board (I know there's nothing official for it)

iyah · May 29, 2025 at 11:10 AM

Hi LE Community,

Took it upon myself to get Kodi going on the Opi 03.

It actually goes ... to some extent.

A clean Jammy install with a compiled (GS / GLES) Kodi has the Kodi UI (just UI, no videos) barely keeping up.

So with the Opi config menu (orangepi-config) you select GPU and restart, and the panfrost drivers are loaded, as are a vew v4l drivers. Kodi UI is now quite good.

Videos are mostly good. The issue is that even though *most* videos play ok, a look into the system menu shows that the CPU usage is still about 50-70 percent. This tells me that the CPU is still being used, at least partly, for rendering video.

Question: Is that a fair assumption ?

Then moving on to TV, I have the NextPVR client logged into a NextPVR server, and some HD channels play quite well. Again though, CPU usage for those is about 50-70%. Other HD channels however do not play well at all (and the CPU usage is up at 90-100%).

This is some of the lsmod output:

Question: Can someone explain why, after what seems to be a successful load of the GPU drivers, videos still don't use them (or maybe all of their capability) ?

Maybe va issues ... ?

Or any otherr general tips welcome.

Thnaks and cheers

Iyah

**chewitt** · May 30, 2025 at 1:33 AM

On an ARM SoC device the GPU is used for 2D/3D rendering (GUI) only and hardware acceleration (codecs) are separate things. As Panfrost supports the GPU hardware the GUI works, while decoding requires specific drivers that need adapting to silicon changes with each new chip. The latter are always non-trivial effort and the gene pool of people with the skillsets for the task is tiny; and most of them are commercial developers not the folks working pro-bono that everything normally depends upon. As such the process is slow .. and support probably doesn't exist yet. Over SSH use 'kodi-remote' to press 'o' on the keyboard to bring up the OSD that shows whether you are using (SW) or (HW) decode; but we already know the answer to that.

iyah · May 30, 2025 at 7:16 AM

Thanks for the clarification Chewitt.

So I just got wind of the H618 release built by jernej. Installed it and low and behold, it works well. For video.

So would I be correct in presuming that I could *theoretically* take bits of his/her code, and make it part of the compilation, and have the decoders work in standard Jammy ? That I'd be willing to try ... if only I knew exactly what to take ...

I'd imagine then I could end up with a standard Jammy kodi wth sound/video and what not .. ? I pressed "o" to see what decoders were running there (forget now) but have not done that on the std jammy compile.

Do you think that would be worth a try ?

Thanks

iyah

**chewitt** · May 30, 2025 at 7:26 AM

If you grab the relevant Linux, Kodi, and FFmpeg patches (which are probably in jernej GitHub repo; he's one of the Allwinner kernel developers) you should be able to (re)compile things for another distro. There's no HOWTO guide for that kind of thing though, so it'll be down to your tinkering skills.