Banana Pi (M1), Bananian and hardware acceleration for VLC

[Patrick Frank]

Hello,

on my Banana Pi (I think its an M1) I run the Jessie image from bananian.org with LXDE and VLC via HDMI.

And videos with a 720p resolution play well but only with 1:1 size not on fullscreen.

Videos with 1080p resolution do not play properly either way.

So I enabled the Mali driver in the kernel and lsmod shows that it was loaded successfully.

Then I followed linux-sunxi.org/Mali_binary_driver and linux-sunxi.org/Xorg and /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows that fbturbo loaded successfully.

But the problem with VLC stays the same. Any ideas how to troubleshoot this problem?

Greetings,

Patrick

[Patrick Frank]

Hello again,

my posting yesterday was incorrect. The Xorg.log does show errors which seem DRI2 related.

So I wiped the system and installed the Lubuntu image from bananapi.com which has Mali enabled by default.

I walked through the sunxi related Xorg docs again. And the test for libdri2 results in the error message:

"Error: eglInitialise failed!"

Any ideas?

Patrick

[Manuel Braga]

Hello.
It appears that you are having a misunderstand by thinking that to have
hardware accelerated video decoding would require a GPU (3d graphic
engine), this is not true.

You can find a explication in this link.
http://www.cnx-software.com/2013/12/10/most-embedded-gpus-do-not-support-hardware-video-decoding-acceleration-the-vpu-does/

--
Manuel Braga

[Patrick Frank]

Thank you for posting that article, Manuel.

I must admit that I do not fully understand hardware internals and I did not buy my Banana Pi for educational purposes. I wanted to build a cheap multimedia center.

So when the video encoding takes places in the VPU I am assuming the component that is used in the Banana Pi M1 is not capable of 1080p video playback? Or what is the message behind your posting?

Patrick

On Friday, March 11, 2016 at 8:35:13 PM UTC+1, Manuel Braga wrote:

On Thu, 10 Mar 2016 08:00:42 -0800 (PST) Patrick Frank

[...]

[Manuel Braga]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2016 12:45:59 -0800 (PST) Patrick Frank
<patrick....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for posting that article, Manuel.
> I must admit that I do not fully understand hardware internals and I
> did not buy my Banana Pi for educational purposes. I wanted to build
> a cheap multimedia center.
> So when the video encoding takes places in the VPU I am assuming the
> component that is used in the Banana Pi M1 is not capable of 1080p
> video playback? Or what is the message behind your posting?

Hi.
The message was that you are in the wrong path.

A20, which your device use, is well capable of 1080p hardware
accelerated video playback. In the case of wanting to know more, here
is a link here for information reference. http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus

One thing to have attention, is to use a media player with support to
use vdpau.

As i know it is a pain to do source code compiling for someone that is
not here for "educational purposes". I advise you to just use a ready
made image.

From my knowledge, i believe that http://www.armbian.com/ is one of
those, which already include the above software ready to use.

--
Manuel Braga