New Bionic version of Armbian Media Script

[jschwart]

Thanks for all the pages! I'll read through them.

Some more info and observations:
- the exact same setup (even same SD card), works fine with Tinker OS
- I'm using an official Raspberry Pi PSU (possibly ok for Tinker OS but too weak for Armbian?)
- I'm using Etcher to write the image, it passes the verification phase
- I waited for more than one hour in the end and found that the partition table had not even been changed when I put the SD card back in my computer. As this would be done before the filesystem resize operation, it seems that it did not even reach this stage.
- I tried both the default and next images with bionic (maybe I should try stretch instead)

I have no convenient way to connect to the GPIO pins, also not for a serial port, but I guess a USB serial adapter won't do the trick either. I will see if there is any log written to the SD card, possibly I could find more information in there. Another thing I can try is using the internal storage instead of an SD card.

[Im4Tinker]

I advice that is better to bring result of the process doing, because nobody can imagine the details of the given descriptions. text messages, or pictures.

1. Was the setup written fine? Etcher screenshot
   
2. Raspberry PSU, photo
   
3. as above mentioned
   
4. the output of
   Code:

   $ sudo parted -l /sdXY
   XY are the kernel assigned code once the SD/eMMC is plugged into PC USB.
   
5. Same as above
   
6. Why? do you have a boxed TB, without exposed pins? It might be necessary to unbox it for the testing. Same picture may help
   
7. The only way to know what happening during the booting process is by using a USB adaptor plugged to the GPIO. If not, just take the results as they coming.
   
8. You may resize your partition after booting by gparted, or by the PC with gparted too.
   

[jschwart]

I just figured out the problem. I did not realize that the bootloader for the different systems is different and that the internal storage comes with a boot loader out of the box that *only* boots Tinker OS.

Now I switched the jumper to the correct position. Within seconds I had a signal on HDMI and a few seconds later I saw a login prompt. (There were no minutes of waiting without display output.)

Reading more through the forum, I noticed a post by you about an Armbian specific U-Boot. This made me realize my mistake. Thanks a lot all the help you're providing around here. Without it I would probably have taken me much longer to find my silly mistake!!

[igorpec]

Great to hear this! & thanks for trying out!

[Im4Tinker]

Definitely TinkerOS and armbian using a different booting method.
Specially because Linaro (aka tinkerOS) uses a different partition for starting.

[jschwart]

I haven't actually ran the media script, but my findings with Armbian Bionic:
Firefox & Chromium are working fine and up to date as opposed to Debian/Tinker OS/Raspbian. VLC stutters sometimes with Tinker OS when playing a radio stream, but it works fine in Armbian. It seems Armbian Bionic is a lot more polished than Tinker OS.

[Im4Tinker]

t seems Armbian Bionic is a lot more polished than Tinker OS.

I'd say that Armbian is more actively caring user problems than Linaro, which remains as it was at the issuing day.
For Armbian we can find nightly build to test, I didn't hear about Linaro has it.

[TB_User]

Well I tried it out. gstreamer and MPV seems to be working as advertised.

However I do have problems smooth youtube playback. It looks like there is something wrong with latest Chromium and Armbian combo. Youtube keeps buffering for split second after each 5 sec playback. CPU load is hovering in 50% range so HW accelerations seems to be working. And it's not network issue since I'm connected to my 1Gbit LAN. Tinker OS + Chromium v67 working just fine.
Pity it isn't working for me since it looks like Armbian is under more actively development.

Still there is one good aspect for me. I became aware of h264ify extension and especially it's ability to disable 60fps playback.
Now I can turn on full 1080p playback on TinkerOS and watch 1080p60 content on youtube. CPU load seems to be spiking sometimes into 75-80 range, but it doesn't affect playback much. Very few dropped frames here and there. I'm using Youtube in TV mode from my couch since interface is snappier compared to my 4 year old Sony Bravia TV.

[Z80]

Well I tried it out. gstreamer and MPV seems to be working as advertised.

However I do have problems smooth youtube playback. It looks like there is something wrong with latest Chromium and Armbian combo. Youtube keeps buffering for split second after each 5 sec playback. CPU load is hovering in 50% range so HW accelerations seems to be working. And it's not network issue since I'm connected to my 1Gbit LAN. Tinker OS + Chromium v67 working just fine.
Pity it isn't working for me since it looks like Armbian is under more actively development.

Still there is one good aspect for me. I became aware of h264ify extension and especially it's ability to disable 60fps playback.
Now I can turn on full 1080p playback on TinkerOS and watch 1080p60 content on youtube. CPU load seems to be spiking sometimes into 75-80 range, but it doesn't affect playback much. Very few dropped frames here and there. I'm using Youtube in TV mode from my couch since interface is snappier compared to my 4 year old Sony Bravia TV.

Im very happy with Armbian,  it seems rock solid with no system freezes.  I can watch youtube in chromium at 720p  problem, 1080p does seem to judder every 5 seconds or so
i tried watching youtube in Kodi (kodi is installed by default) but could not seem to select 1080p playback, but i guess it would play better in Kodi
Im sticking with Armbian, as i had the occasional freeze using tinker OS (not sure which image i was using think it was the one that had been made by mike with lots of stuff installed by efault) The only problem is Netfilx will no work

---

Just tried watching youtube in Firefox at 1080p and it seems fine, i cannot test too long as it uses too much of my data, but it seemed to run for 5 mins with no freezes

to install Firefox i had  to do  sudo apt-get install iceweasel


think iceweasel and firefox are the same not sure

[TB_User]

Hm! Firefox works indeed just fine.

However it uses vp9 encoding so it's not hardware accelerated since tinkerboard supports only avc h264. Also with vp9 constant 90% processor usage kind of confirms that.