HI, I bought Rock3a and tried to watch YouTube in 1080 but it’s laggy. MPV and VLC are even worse. According to infrmations given by radxa it should support 4k video so fullHD should be piece of cake for this SoC. I flashed memory card using official bullseye image. If you’ve seen all that promisses about “supported” technologies on the product page you might think it’s great choice as a small media centre. However it’s just a rubbish or I do somethink wrong. My question is: is it any possible to enable all that promissed features on this board or not? Additionaly supported Debian and Ubuntu are very obsolete.
Is Rock 3a supporting hardware video acceleration?
Rockchip uses a method “rkmpp” for hardware video codecs and that is not supported by standard Linux software like FireFox, Chromium, mpv, VLC. Only special builds of those software will support it. Not mal for Linux on Intel is “vaapi” and linux on Arm “v4l2m2m”.
The bullseye image I looked at but I can’t take that serious as you cannot dist-upgrade it for example.
Only thing I got working without compiling own sources is Armbian Bookworm/Trixie with ‘vendor’ kernel (6.1.115 currently) and ffmpeg special build including rkmpp from Jellyfin. That at least allows you to use decode and encode video CLI based using the hardware decoders.
YT 1080 can also be vp9 codec, that is not in RK3568, so will be laggy on 4x Cortex-A55.
It might be that LibreElec or KODI have rkmpp build-in, so that should form a better basis I guess as media player. A media center I consider something else, is more headless server with Jellyfin.
Or maybe this works: https://github.com/JeffyCN/libv4l-rkmpp
If a v4l wrapper is there, the standard Linux software should be able to use HW codecs (in browsers I think)
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