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I had a couple of hours to have an initial play with both the SD card and NVME images for the original Orange PI 5 (8Gb RAM on mine).
I had also modified the boot to run from USB but when flashed to a USB stick, it would not boot.
If, like me, you are a keen Kodi user and have been waiting for an installation that would play content across the board, then rejoice.
X265 green screen issues are gone and GPU hardware acceleration is there, by default for everything.
8Bit, 10 bit, HDR (plays on my non HDR TV, so not sure if it will automatically get triggered on a caompatible TV/monitor), AV1, 8K, all pretty much perfect.
Of the hundreds of files that I threw at it, only 2 did not play perfectly, exhibiting stuttered playback but it did not spoil my enjoyment one little bit.
Kodi is bundled by default and at version 20.2. Kodi is not yet fully optimised by the official developers, which makes performance at this stage even more impressive.
I’ve never been keen on Android TV and the foibles that are there because of Googles design philosophy are there but this is the same pretty much everywhere, so you have to get used to it.
This Android build has a full and feature rich array of settings options that you would want to see, so distinct set-ups are available. I personally love the default on screen keyboard that has been chosen, where I can select text and numbers without having to change display modes.
Google Play Services are there and you can sign in to the Play Store, although the search button does not work (at least not with a mouse), so you will have to either pick from the listed app options, install an alternative APK store or side load what you want.
Being Android TV, there are no pull down menus from top or bottom of the screen. I know that they can be added, so it should not be an issue if required.
An alternative YouTube app is bundled and it does work very well. Everything up to 4K 60fps (including AV1) played consistently well although I could not see how to pull up the stats for nerds. It did pop up once but I don’t know what I did to get it up. Just watching playback was buttery smooth across the board though.
Chrome is the default browser, although others can be added (some of the more popular ones threw errors when attempting to access).
I began surfing with the WebGL samples site, specifically the Aquarium.
Results were better than I have seen with any other OS.
Up to 1000 fish was rock solid at 60fps.
With 5000, things moved around but with anaverage around 53-54fps, which was very impressive.
10000 is normally not worth looking at but with this, 30 fps was pretty much locked in and was even more impressive.
General surfing was as I would hope for (cannot stand the mobile app set-up, so desktop selected by default for me).
YouTube playback via Chromewas a mixed bag but not for the lack of ability to play streamed content smoothly.
Instead I found that one minute I was playing without issues and then, with just a change in resolution to test, I would get the winding circle, usually reminiscent of waiting for content to be buffered. But this was not the case because if I backed out and then played again from the searched selection list, it was fine.
It was not a consistent issue and could not be re-created on demand but was definitely persistent.
I also noticed many artefacts at times, with partially scrambled screens, with green usually being the primary colour of artefact. But backing out and coming back in would oten result in smooth playback.
There is a specific app draw that holds newly installed apps but I could not find a way to move or copy any out of the draw to the main page, although I only spent a few minutes looking, so it may be easier than I thin to achieve it.
A great deal more testing to do but my first impressions are of a very high praise and happy state.
To the point where I overwrote what I already had on the NVME SSD to be used as a daily driver.
I will have to purchase a compatible Bluetooth dongle first though as the ones that I have are not seen.
One in particular being a 4.0 dongle that tends to work with anything and everything out of the box and has always been the cheapest you can get on every Fleabay store front.
Right at the end of my testing though, I did find an issue but I’m not entirely sure what caused it.
I noted that there was no app or button to activate a shutdown.
There is one for restart but as my board is 10 feet away, I can’t reach across to press the power button once, which does power it off if the option is selected in settings.
But somehow, the result of my messing about was that on restart, instead of coming back into the OS, it came back to Android recovery, where I had to carry out a complete reset in order to get back to Android and set it up from scratch again.
If a power off button or app could be bundled by default, that would be very useful for me.
All in all though, a big step forward to a practical, functional OS use that, IMO opinion, will happily satisfy Android users (at least from what I have seen so far). It certainly gets my vote right now.
Which begs a question and an obvious proposal.
With Orange Pi essentially having long abandoned both their development of Android or their much vaunted but failed Orange Pi OS, maybe they could throw some money and product to mo123, with the appropriate source codes and have him create your official images.
His initial effort is most certainly light years ahead of what you have been developing since last year!!
Once I get screen capture up and running I will likely create a rough and ready video for YouTube to inspire others to try this.
This forum is so neglected that I am sure that many users will be missing out on the opportunity to have something working as desired at this stage of OS development.
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Published in 2023-9-10 12:55:34
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