Hardware H.264 Encoding with GStreamer on Radxa Cubie A5E

Cubie Series A5E
1

I am using a Radxa Cubie A5E with Radxa OS – Debian 11 Bullseye and am trying to run a GStreamer pipeline for H.264 video encoding using the board’s hardware encoder.

I am looking for explicit, Cubie A5E–specific guidance on the following:

1. Supported Hardware Encoder

  • Which H.264 hardware encoder is supported on Cubie A5E under Debian 11?

  • Is the encoder exposed through:

    • v4l2h264enc

    • omxh264enc

    • cedarc

    • or a Radxa-specific GStreamer plugin?

2. Required Packages and Versions

  • Exact package names required for enabling hardware H.264 encoding (GStreamer core and plugins, V4L2, OMX, CedarX, etc.)

  • Minimum required versions of:

    • GStreamer

    • Kernel

    • V4L2 / media drivers

  • Whether Radxa-patched packages are required instead of upstream Debian packages

3. Verified Working Pipeline Examples

I am specifically looking for tested and confirmed working gst-launch-1.0 examples on Cubie A5E, such as:

  • CSI/MIPI camera → H.264 → MP4 file

  • USB camera (MJPEG or YUYV) → H.264 → MP4 file

  • Raw frames → H.264 → RTP/UDP stream

My goal is to follow the official and recommended approach for hardware H.264 encoding on this platform and avoid trial-and-error with unsupported plugins.

If there is existing documentation, sample scripts, or a reference repository for Cubie A5E video encoding, please share a link.

Thanks in advance.

2

Any update on this query?
If hardware H.264 encoding on Radxa Cubie A5E is not fully supported on Radxa OS (Debian 11 Bullseye), is there an alternative Radxa-supported OS?

3

I’m looking for exactly the same but for Cubie A7Z (also Radxa OS Debian 11 Bullseye). I need answers to the exact same questions… kind of angry already that the advertisement is very misleading - the camera stack barely works, and now encoding also doesn’t work :face_with_symbols_on_mouth:

1 Like
4

I have made an issue on their git regarding this:
https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-cubie-a5e/issues/5

They gave me a solution that instructs you to compile the tools manually, but the links they provided for the dependencies (like mpp and gstreamer-rockchip) are actually taken down/dead. I am currently asking them for valid mirrors or a proper package solution.
You can follow that issue for updates.

5

Omfg ! I knew i was not going crazy over this.. I’ve been trying to make the 4k radxa mipi camera working for days - From Gstreamer to FF.

Nothing works, specially when they said “hardware/accessories” compatible & overlays are showing the camera. It is ticked but i’m sure we missing depedencies / repository.

2 Likes
6

still no solutions? anyone?