Accelerated HW decoding on Amlogic SoC

ARM General ARM Discussion
1

Hi!

I’d like to ask if it possible to decode movies using the HW decoder in the VPU on Amlogic chips.

I do have X96Max which comes with s905x3 and the kernel has the staging modules for decoding enabled.

However, I’m not sure how to enable it in the userspace. I assume there need to be some patches for mpv and ffmpeg. Right?

Has anyone tried before?

Are there any constraints from license point as h264 and HVEC both need to be licensed. Does the HW deal with that - you both a chip that allows that and it’s part of the cost of the device.

2

If you want to use you device as media device then we recommend using LibreElec or CoreElec as VPU on desktop use case is complicated atm.

You will have to install pkgs which make conflict with other dependencies.

You can try installing hwdec based pkg to get vpu working on mpv and kodi but they will make you lose chromium browser as there is ffmpeg version conflict.

3

Just to at to @spikerguy note. After you install hwdec packages screen capture apt like “spectacle” will not launch and “flameshot” launch but doesn’t seem to capture.