The Allwinner "Cedrus" Video Decoder Supports H.265 On Linux 5.5

[Terrablit]

Does anyone know which x265 profiles are supported in the hardware decoder? Is it just HEVC Main, or does it also handle 10bit decoding like with HEVC Main 10?

[starshipeleven]

No it's not. Firefox has supported HW accelerated videos via Flash for eternity.

Flash is a plugin, and it will HW accelerate only flash videos. This is why you cannot say "firefox can HW accelerate with Flash". If the site has flash videos they are played with Flash, if not you don't HW accelerate.

Also if your system is ARM you can't install flash player because it is available only for x86 (32bit and 64bit PC) systems so you can't use it on raspi or these boards.

Firefox HW acceleration means that firefox can play videos served with HTML5 standard with HW acceleration.

I know that many parts of the rendering pipeline are accelerated and even video decoding can be offloaded.

On windows yes, on Linux media decoding is NOT HW accelerated.

Chrome, OTOH, has long supported hw accelerated video.

Never on Linux. There are some patches for chromium and some distros like OpenSUSE do provide chromium with this patch merged to at least try it out. On my system it's not usable (I get modern art psychedelic slideshows when I try to play around 30% of Youtube videos I try to watch, and 100% of youtube livestreams are unwatchable, when I switch off HW acceleration the video and streams plays correctly).

many people have been successful with technology such as Pipelight DRM.

Pipelight is a wrapper for Microsoft Silverlight, I don't know if it is doing HW acceleration, but it works only for sites that require SIlverlight. Afaik Silverlight was discontinued and deprecated years ago.

Can't view any videos without proprietary flash plugin.

I tried 10 videos from the first page of www dot chaturbate dot com and they work fine, I can see the chat and write. I don't have any flash player installed and I never had on this system. Firefox 70, OpenSUSE tumbleweed.

Consider that by the end of 2020 Flash will be officially discontinued by Adobe, so all half-serious sites should have a HTML5 video service set up by now, november 2019

[DanL]

Does anyone know which x265 profiles are supported in the hardware decoder? Is it just HEVC Main, or does it also handle 10bit decoding like with HEVC Main 10?

https://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus

...leads me to believe only 8 bit.

[George99]

On my system it's not usable (I get modern art psychedelic slideshows when I try to play around 30% of Youtube videos I try to watch, and 100% of youtube livestreams are unwatchable, when I switch off HW acceleration the video and streams plays correctly).

I know what you mean as I had same problems with earlier versions of Chromium on debian/sid, but for now it plays perfectly. (AMD 2200G APU grahpics)

[pabloski]

Raspi sucks

Until you try the alternatives.

Tried to build a smart doorbell with a BananaPI M2M first, then an OrangePI Zero Plus2 H5. Terrible software-side support. Old kernels, a lot of binary blobs, a lot of bugs. They have an ffmpeg-3.3.x binary, in a dir under /usr/local/bin and they didn't even bother to install its dependencies. Yes, you try to run it and the executable spits out xxx.so not found. Why a special binary? Because it supports their CedarX proprietary h264 hardware encoder. Otherwise no luck with that. For some reason, BananaPI images don't have the audio codec driver built-in. You cannot use the audio system on the M2M ( there is a great DAC with a 100dB amplifier and an on-board mic, but you must use a community distro with all the software bits in their place...but you lose on the camera side, because there is no CedarX in the community distro ).

There are some amateurish Linux spins. Always lack something. Absurd hardware lock-in ( you cannot use RPi cameras on these things...why? I can even use the RPi camera module on a Nvidia Jetson Nano!! ).

Opensource support. Yes there is and there isn't. The guys at Bootlin are doing an amazing job, but they are forced to fight against a behemoth of closed source blobs ( Allwinner ).

Armbian and friends sadly don't support MIPI CSI on these boards. Ouch, you cannot even use a CSI camera. What about the camera ecosystem? Forget about M12 lens mounts, wide angle fisheye lenses, IR-cut cameras, auto focus. You just have the bare camera module they sell ( OV5640 for BananaPI and GC2350 for OrangePI ).

Sadly I have been forced to return to the old and tried RPi Zero. Its SoC is slow compared to the quad core ones on the other two boards, but at least you have a working platform to start with.

So I will start considering the chinese boards only when they will start playing the opensource game seriously.

[starshipeleven]

Until you try the alternatives.

You get what you pay for. Raspi still sucks.

I'm not touching anything like that, I only use x86 systems because I can't be arsed to deal with embedded device bs.

It's more expensive but I'm not deploying them en-masse so I don't care.

[pabloski]

You get what you pay for. Raspi still sucks.

I'm not touching anything like that, I only use x86 systems because I can't be arsed to deal with embedded device bs.

It's more expensive but I'm not deploying them en-masse so I don't care.

What about power consumption and heat? I have a RPi Zero encoding a camera input 24/24, at 40-45° Celsius and just 200mA.

[starshipeleven]

What about power consumption and heat?

It's comparable to a decent wifi access point unless you are running stuff like prime95.

[Terrablit]

https://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus

...leads me to believe only 8 bit.

Thanks for the link and info. It shows the relevant models as well as the decoding profiles.

[pabloski]

It's comparable to a decent wifi access point unless you are running stuff like prime95.

And this is the problem. A RPi Zero W at 100% CPU utilization, draws no more than 350mA and reaches no more than 50-55° Celsius. I know that x86 SoCs have all those power management features. But they are nothing if the CPU starts frying when under any meaningful load. In fact x86 fanless configurations are a black art ( think about Compulab ).