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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

That’s somewhat understandable, but still a bit disappointing. Not all playback devices support HEVC, and additionally HEVC will likely remain patent-encumbered much longer than e.g. H.264.

I really wish there was at least one other and open hardware-accelerated format. It’s probably a bit too early for AV1, but VP9 would work with modern iOS and Android devices, for example.

I also wonder how much licensing costs were a concern here, although past RPis had software-unlockable codecs for that exact reason.

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The rk3588 and rk3588s (i.e. orange pi 5) both support hardware H264/HEVC encoding @ 8k30fps, as well as hardware HEVC/VP9 decoding @ 8k60fps, H264 decoding @ 8k30fps, AV1 decoding @ 4k60fps.

Aren't they like 4x the price too?

The boards are the same price, i. OrangePI 5 8GB costs same as Raspberry 5 8GB. At least in EU.

Yes, and there are more advantages to the Orange Pi 5 SBCs:

- They have full size HDMI - They have an m.2 connector - They still have an audio jack - They have more powerful performance cores - They have low performance cores - They have a 6 TOPS NPU

On the other hand, that cheap base model has no built-in wifi, but so you can add it in the m.2 slot.

For me, the Raspberry Pi 5 is quite disappointing. But hey, the good thing is that maybe this will push more of the community to the RK3588(S) based boards.

Orange Pi also has a bunch of extra features too including some standout ones like

* don't need to spend extra $$ for M.1 SSD support

* full-size HDMI so no need for $10 dongle

* 6 TOPS NPU

* better Mali G610 MP4 GPU

* 8k60 output

* USB 3.1 port (10gb/s instead of just 5gb/s)

* 4x A55 cores

* Audio jack

Nobody needs that GPU. Alyssa Rosenzweig stopped working on the driver and got poached by Valve.

Also, real time encoding with VP8 (yes, that is the standard for WebRTC) barely works. It has barely enough CPU power to produce a working demo, but too little to actually do anything with it.

> Nobody needs that GPU [..]

Can you expand on this? Is the hardware too slow, too power hungry, or just badly supported? At least coming from ARM there must be some hardware documentation on how they work. I mean, it can't be worse than Broadcom's all-proprietary GPUs.

In fact, she just no longer leads panfrost, but still reviews panfrost-related merge requests from time to time. Boris took over her place, and even panvk2 is on its way. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/bbrezillon

Mali-G610MP4 is known to handle Genshin impact easily. (https://youtu.be/sA55S2Z7gLo?t=56) I doubt VideoCore VII can do that. As of today, there is still no detailed spec sheet for this GPU.

That GPU does pretty well for running an LLM though.

Llama 7B at 2.8 tok/s via Mlc-chat.

I'm setting up an LLM discord bot with it.

Mini-HDMI doesn't require a dongle. Just get the right cable. They're just as cheap as a normal HDMI cable.

Are any of Orange Pi boards mainlined?

Yes.

Hi, happen to have some reference for this?

I upstreamed some of them.

Here's a complete list:

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/bo... https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/bo... https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm/boot...

just search for orange. Most of Orange Pi boards have upstream support. Like one or two don't.

opi5 16gb is about 130 usd, rpi5 is about 80 usd I think? You get twice the cores and RAM so I think they're comparable value. But it's sort of academic for me because rpi5 8GB is not in stock in Australia.

Surprisingly, AV1 is easier to implement a decoder for than VP9 (by design). Some of the VP9 transforms were axed with AV1 purely to make the stream easier to decode.

Why AV1 hardware decoding has taken so long seems to be an issue with hardware manufactures not wanting to support it. HEVC and VVC seem to have more hardware support.

HEVC was built from the ground up to be implemented in hardware to stem the tide of the open-source codecs and thus keep the license money train running.

Well, at least the newest iPhone Pro models finally support it! Apple seems to finally be coming around to the idea of non-MPEG codecs.

> HEVC and VVC seem to have more hardware support.

Yes to HEVC, but which common SoC already supports VVC? AV1 hardware support seems to be much more widespread.

They say elsewhere that the quality and usability of them did not meet what they considered reasonable for the mm^2 of die space required.

Ah, yes, I do agree on the quality – it certainly can't compete in any way with high-quality software or dedicated encoders.

But arguably it doesn't have to; many real-time applications (e.g. surveillance cameras) have local bandwidth to spare and/or don't care too highly about quality, and compatibility with older viewing devices without re-encoding is a priority.

If compatibility is a priority and bandwidth isn't an issue, MJPEG is still the way to go and is by far the most common encoding I see in security cameras.

On the other hand you could get cool stuff from the video encoding hardware, such as access to motion vectors on the cheap: https://github.com/osmaa/pinymotion

I wonder though if the OpenGL ES3.1 compute could be used for this purpose on it.

Oh wow, this is such a great hack!

I think nobody used MJPEG in last 15 years.

Well, GP just shared that it's still widely used within security cameras?

It's also the only compressed format supported by many popular webcams, e.g. Logitech's C900 series ever since they removed H.264.

Digital cinema projectors apparently also use it (well, the JPEG2000 variant) exclusively since MPEG-2 was deprecated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package

If bandwidth ain't much of an issue, can just dump frames to a separate device for encoding, aside, Can't imagine someone using a pi 5 just for camera usage (aside from projects needing cameras)

I was hoping to use RPI5 as an NVR with image detection for Home Automation.

The Frigate add-on with Home Assistant can publish events based on image detection for automations and supports RPI3 / RPI4 hardware acceleration.

https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/hardware_accelerati...

ESP32CAM might be good enough.

https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com honestly I'd get a home server and run HA through docker, it's gotten me into home servers.

Maybe not only for cameras, but also for cameras. And when doing other things simultaneously, a video encoder not hogging all processing power becomes even more important.

If it is a vanilla Broadcom Soc then die space is not really their consideration or decision. But maybe it is customised for RPi?

Can't find the datasheet for the BCM2712 right now.

Well, to quote Gordon Hollingworth on the original post:

"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far."

Also, Raspberry Pi Foundation and Broadcom have been really working together on successors since the... BCM2787 in the Raspberry Pi 3, if I remember correctly? Broadcom still reserves the right to sell to anyone, but the Pi is still the primary customer for those specific chips now.

Last time I tried to encode a video from H.264 to HEVC (hw-accelerated) on Linux it was such a pain to get to work that I eventually gave up and simply accepted the performance hit. I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna recompile ffmpeg so that it works on my machine. Considering that most RPi-users probably use a Linux-based OS this is IMHO a sensible decision.

Well it's not that uncommon to use a version of ffmpeg with more features enabled for a specific purpose. For instance my jellyfin server uses jellyfin-ffmpeg[0] to do hardware acceleration, even on my Pi.

[0]: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ffmpeg

For hardware acceleration it's probably easier to use gstreamer, depending on what device you are using to decode. But then you have a whole new problem.

The default ffmpeg I got from Raspberry Pi OS supports hardware acceleration out of the box these days, as far as I remember.

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