64 bit Gentoo On Raspberry Pi 3 HOWTO

[antonlacon]

In theory, the RPi3 can decode 1080p MPEG-2 in software, but it's on the edge of what it can do.

I wouldn't expect it to have any trouble with software decoding of mpeg2. As I'm typing this, I have a RPi3 playing HEVC at 1080p. It had some difficulty at release doing this (thermal throttling), but it's done well for the last few months with updated firmware. Note this is using libreelec as a base, not Gentoo.

[dr_wulsen]

@neddy,sakaki,antonlacon

thank you all for your support on that topic and you've helped out really a lot;
but I guess I'll be leaving the 64bit path and am currently compiling from scratch into 32bit, so I can get my mediacenter (which I could have built and destroyed a couple times if I had used an ELEC image or similar in that time) running.

I's gotta be gentoo and I'm trying to optimize what I can out of that four little cores, willing that it'll crash again and I'll be wiser again.

@Sakaki: I'm sorry for not being able to provide benchmark results of the 64bit kernel, but if all builds on 32 bit, I'll let you have the results.

Thanks once more!

[Zucca]

I almost got 1080p@30fps,h264 to play smoothly. smplayer and vlc weren't up to it so I compiled mpv. It only dropped few frames here an there.
Little after testing my Pi froze. :( It was while moving a window... I wasn't able to reproduce the freezing.

I also tried to run smplayer (mplayer uninstalled), but smplayer wasn't able to initialize mpv backend (didn't dug more into it), but instead just quit.

Few questions:

• Are there any other h.264 decoders mpv could try?
• mpv has rpi and rpi-copy --hwdec values selectable, but it says those aren't compiled in when I tried.
  • None of the USE -flags seem to enable that. Any tips?
• Could compiling xv output support for mpv help the performance vs. opengl?
• Is there a way to auto-enable performance CPU governor when playing video using video-player X?
  • ... and to drop back to ondemand (or whatever was the last governor) when playing is finished?

Also I did read a little about kernel CPU frequency/speed governors... It seems that RPi3 CPU can only switch between 600MHz and 1200MHz. So there isn't any selectable frequency between them. Right? So there's not much sense to use conservative governor. Right?