Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding on the PinePhone with Clapper

July 06, 2021

In my previous post, I showed a way to get hardware accelerated video playback working on the PinePhone. However, it required using the command line to launch the video and it was not possible to control the playback with the touchscreen.

Thanks to the efforts of Rafostar, it is now possible to have full hardware accelerated video playback on the PinePhone within a GTK application with an adaptive UI! This capability is present on the master branch of Clapper. The video shown below was encoded at 1080p with the H.264 codec.

Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding on the PinePhone

June 27, 2021

I was able to get hardware accelerated video decoding working on the PinePhone. It is not integrated into any of the usual video playback apps, but it is possible to launch the video from the command line using GStreamer. I tested it on Arch Linux with kernel version 5.12.7-1-danctnix and the Phosh interface.

I don’t see any stutters and the audio sounds great and synced. The total CPU usage was 10-11% and the gst-play-1.0 app was using 33% of one CPU according to top. Here’s a brief video of the playback:

Casting local video to Chromecast from OpenWrt

January 30, 2020

I actually have some movies on some optical disks. Weird, I know. It can sometimes be cheaper to buy a physical copy of a movie than to buy it on a streaming service. Plus, if said streaming service ever goes belly-up, you still have your movie! I like that.

What I don’t like is rooting around in my cabinet trying to find disks. So I rip my disks… to disk (heh). So I have a nice copy of my movies, but now I want to cast them to my Chromecast. And so I set out on my quest to wrangle the Chromecast and its idiosyncrasies.