The newest offical Image of OrangePi PC2

Buddy

Hi, all friends:
   We build a new Ubuntu Xenial Image and add some useful tools to help you easily to achieve you mind.
   New Image fixed some bug and make system more stable and powerful.
   It will makes something easy and funny for using. So, pls use this Image to develop your world.

   [Download] https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzAcx3iAhraodXNoaldHNzJWWmM
   
   
   ------------------------------------------------------------------
   [Feature]
   1. Full development tools:
      Python, Jave, C/C++ IDE..etc
      

   2. Full office tools
       lbreoffice, gedit, vim...etc
      
  3. Userful system tools
  4. Internet tools and media tools
  5. Funny Game and education software

   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   OrangePi PC have full Linux SDK, you can utilize this SDK to build different distro. You can git SDK from github:
    [Download]   https://github.com/OrangePiLibra/OrangePi_H5SDK.git
   Friendly way to build SDK, only execute scritps "build.sh", different distro will be create.
   
   different distro
   
  

Horrorzilla

kaiser replied at 2017-1-10 18:27
What are you talking about?! Allwinner's video engine in H5 SoC is capable of decoding 4K video and ...

Listen fanboy - with no support from OrangePi all of that is meaningless. What is annoying is you and others making excuses for poor to zero support for a board someone paid good money for. No matter what the Allwinner H5 SoC can do it is pointless without any support.

kaiser

thc013 replied at 2017-1-2 03:35
@kit lower the screen resolution to avoid purple screen

Nope, this is just the result of a HDMI-to-DVI converter in between and can be adjusted in the .dtb (you would've to alter boot script to be able to exchange .dtb though).

Also regarding Mali drivers: This is also wrong. If you're not a retro gamer or like to look at stupid OpenGL ES benchmarks you gain exactly NOTHING from Mali drivers since they're only responsible for 3D acceleration. Everything else and especially video is unrelated to Mali.

To get decent HW accelerated video playback you need the correct settings and a player making use of VDPAU (eg. mpv or smplayer). According to linux-sunxi dev jemk video decoding there works perfectly and just as with H3 so in case you want to watch youtube videos you have to setup everything correctly and use smtube (which is just a frontend for smplayer which is just a frontend for mplayer which then can make use of Allwinner's video engine).

You will never get any HW accelerated video decoding from within browsers like Firefox or Chromium running in Linux since their developers don't make use of the necessary low-level APIs needed to use Allwinner's video engine. If you want to mis-use a developer board as TV box better use Android or even better buy a f*cking Android TV box and not a dev board that should run Linux!

Seasalt

Orange Pi needs to sort out the PC2 H5 issues very quickly. To issue a board with fundamental failing ie can not play Video is unbelieveable.

I had such a great experience with my Orange Pi PC H3 but the Orange Pi PC2 H5 is a disaster.

If you are thinking of buying a Orange Pi PC2 absolutely hold off untill Orange Pi and Allwinner come up with the software to make it work properly.

Giantofstone

Still unusable. I can do nothing with my orange pipc2. Without the official Mali drivers this thing is worthless. Once you get the driver this thing replaces the whole past.

Buddy

hojnikb replied at 2016-12-13 23:54
@Buddy

Is there any work being done on resolving the dts and dvfs issues ? It sux to have a board l ...

HI friends:
   I have fix dts problem. Now, we can get information from dts.
  pls sync code with github [https://github.com/OrangePiLibra/OrangePi_H5SDK.git]

Kit

kaiser replied at 2017-1-10 18:23
Nope, this is just the result of a HDMI-to-DVI converter in between and can be adjusted in the .dtb ...

Thank you, I will look at that.

By the way I am still looking for a minimalist OS, like Dietpi but for the H5. I plan to use my Pi PC2 headless.

kaiser

Seasalt replied at 2017-1-9 12:30
I am thinking of asking for my money back. I mean what is the point the specification sheet said the Orange Pi PC2 can display 4000 line Video

What are you talking about?! Allwinner's video engine in H5 SoC is capable of decoding 4K video and the HDMI engine is able to display 4K @ 30 Hz. That's what the spec sheet says. This needs software support though. Allwinner might have this implemented for Android (no idea, I use iOS when I want to deal with this sort of stuff), the same functionality is available with proprietary libs in Linux or with the opensource Cedrus 'framework' after you set up environment correctly.

This is totally unrelated to Linux browsers like Firefox or Chromium not being able to use the APIs to talk to the video engine. They always have to do a fallback to software rendering and there 4 slow Cortex-A53 cores are simply not sufficient to deal with high resolutions. In other words: EVERYTHING AS EXPECTED!!! Stop whining! It's annoying!

kaiser

Horrorzilla replied at 2017-1-11 12:09
No matter what the Allwinner H5 SoC can do it is pointless without any support.

So you want this to change? Want to watch videos in Chromium? In Linux? Easy: Just write the necessary plug-ins for Chromium on ARM (armhf when we're talking about H3, arm64 when we're talking about H5) and send the Chromium devs a pull request making use of VA-API using VDPAU (that's the APIs to interact with Allwinner's video engine, still nowhere Mali involved!)

And as soon as you understand where the culprit is (missing support in common Linux browsers to make use of the specific video engines on ARM hardware -- each per vendor and Allwinner being one of the worst choices here) you know who's to blame.

kaiser

Horrorzilla replied at 2017-1-11 12:09
Listen fanboy - with no support from OrangePi all of that is meaningless. What is annoying is you ...

Sure

I just tried to explain why 'the cry for Mali' is useless (3D acceleration only), why Android is the better choice for a TV box (Allwinner's business unit 3 being focused solely on Android and not even thinking about Linux), how it's already possible to use HW accelerated video decoding from within Linux and why you NEVER will be able to play video this way in common Linux browsers like Firefox and Chromium (software needs access to APIs, this is not 'gpu' but Allwinner's video engine which might either be accessed using CedarX or Cedrus -- please educate yourself on both variants).

I tried to explain the main problem over there: http://www.cnx-software.com/2017 ... gsm/#comment-537982

BTW: I stopped contributing to Buddy's development efforts some time ago since until the BSP structure gets fixed it's just a waste of time to contribute. We (Armbian) might solely focus on mainline kernel with H5 devices since linux-sunxi community progress looks really good. No mis-use as TV box is a welcomed side effect

kaiser

Horrorzilla replied at 2017-1-12 05:39
Has nothing to do with browsers - there is next to no support from OrangePi period. Most images won ...

A) Just with all Linux images for any Allwinner boards watching video HW accelerated in any browser does not work. Period. It can't work and that's due too high fragmentation here (every ARM SoC vendor using an own video engine) and the lack of devs wanting to spend time on this.


B) It is confirmed by exactly the guy who commited Cedrus support for H3 (jemk, Jens Kuske) that it's also working for H5 in the same way. As already mentioned all that's needed is the necessary environment (that means stuff like memory reservations, the necessary packages, config files and env variables, eg. this stuff https://github.com/igorpecovnik/ ... arddeb.sh#L272-L278 )

C) In the past community started pretty fast fixing all this stuff since default OS images from Xunlong were unfortunately not that great. In the meantime that changed since Xunlong hired someone (or even more people) to do software. This seems to discourage community members to spend their time with this boring basic stuff since why should any volunteer do the necessary steps for free when Xunlong pays someone else to do the job. So in the end Xunlong now spending more money on software seems to have quite the opposite effect of what has been intended

D) If I would have an OPi PC 2 here I would've already tested what's outlined in B) above since it's a no-brainer. The settings are known and arm64 packages available: http://beta.armbian.com/pool/ -- the problem is: I sent my PC 2 developer sample to jemk from B) above so I've nothing to play with. And this was the correct decision since jemk as a real developer added DRAM support for mainline u-boot in almost no time: https://github.com/jemk/u-boot/tree/apritzel-h5-dram  (and now other linux-sunxi devs could continue with mainline kernel work for H5)

E) If all those people spending so much time on useless complaints would at least start to contribute in a useful way (see B) and D) above) you could already have what you want (at least HW accelerated video decoding up to 4K in mpv, maybe easily accessible from within common browser as outlined here https://forum.armbian.com/index. ... -very-slow/?p=23024 ). Instead: Only lame whining.

F) If you want a TV box then buy a TV box instead of a development board.

varghese

wow .. great ...

hojnikb

Is dvfs working on this release ? Previous images were locked at 1008Mhz@1.1V, which does not explot the whole capabilites of h5
What about chanching hdmi resolution, is this possible yet ? Currently it's limited to 720p.

Christos

There is the device tree initialization issue (.dtb) that needs to be worked out from @Buddy, it is essential for board operation.

hojnikb

Hopefully this gets fixed soon. Having a partly working board isn't exactly satisfying. But i guess thats understandable, given how cheap this is and h5 is very new still.

Seasalt

This worked really well.

I just  dd if=Ubuntu_Desktop_Xenial_xfce4_PC2_V1_0_0.img | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb bs=16M
to a 16mb sd card and it worked.

Booted OP PC2 up and it said welcome to Ubuntu.

Username orangepi
Password orangepi

It looks amazing.

already has Samba installed.


I installed Kodi and VLC but neither will play network videos properly.

I think this is a great sart and I look forward to the next update.

Christos

As it is right now, the SDK image build system is broken, nothing works, no images can be buildfrom the released SDK any more.
Its verified from everyone that tested it.

Somethings are really messed up lately.

Buddy needs to see to it.

Horrorzilla

Just tried image and it works quite well so far. I am going to remove a lot of the programs I don't need and continue to test it. Firefox installs but is a bit slow, no Chromium install yet. Definitely update, upgrade, and dist-upgrade first.

Horrorzilla

OK - through the software center you can install Chromium and it runs great but pages disappear and need reloaded. Much smoother and faster than Firefox but Qupzilla works best overall.

hojnikb

Interesting, chromium wroks much slower for me.
Firefox is actually pretty smooth and with a bit of frequency bump (1.2-1.3) and mali accelaration, it would be near perfect for the money