I recently bought a r2 board and was hoping to set it up as HTPC and a NAS(sharing media folder over nfs and samba) also use the ethernet ports to bridge the connection to other devices. but I’m not sure about going about to how to do this. Most of the images if found don’t fully support HDMI and the ones that do don’t have audio support. The most recent image I could find that supported both was here
Unfortunately I couldn’t get it configured properly because on reboot it would automatically assign different IP address and vlc (or any other media player) not properly playing video files(audio only) I recently gave up on this image (and its HDMI support) and tried setting up the image I found from the Armbian website. I got everything set up but encountered a problem when streaming video from r2 to other devices connected to it. where the r2 would disconnect from the network I think? it was unreachable by ssh but other devices pugged into still have network. while doing research I found a thread on here about RPS
but I’m not sure if this is related to my problem. also have this problem on the ubuntu image. after about 5 mins of streaming it gets interrupted and only solution is reboot. and since rebooting given me a different ip address I have to reconfigure the nfs shares on other device every 5 mins. so I gave up on that image.
any suggestions on which image I can use to properly set it up the way explained. or how I can get video and audio output on this thing so I don’t have to rely on streaming video over lan that disconnects every 5 mins
Only old 4.4 kernel supports audio over hdmi. Alex and i try to port driver to recent kernel version,but it’s not ready yet. As we have only limited time and got no help from bpi/mtk for this yet we’re stuck.
For network issues,there are also some problems in older kernels…have not used 4.4 a long time so cannot say which was working,but i guess rps was not yet supported. You have 2 gmacs,but hardcoded to lan-ports (eth0) and wan (eth1). Most official images were running unstable in my tests,did not tried armbian
Different ip is mybe based on your dhcp-server (pushes mew ip due to different mac) if you have not configured a static ip.
Which image do you think would fit best for my use case? What is the difference between kernels besides HDMI support? the Armbian image uses kernel 4.19. is network more stable on this kernel? Will RPS work on this image?
also how do I stop getting new Mac address on every reboot.?
I use 5.10 (and before 5.4) in debian buster where net is more stable and rps available. In 5.10 i have hnat and second gmac working now (both in testing state).
Also, AFAIK there is no HW video-decoding support in any kernel (nor BSP, nor mainline) so HTPC plan is a pipedream, at least for now
Not sure about images - IMHO you should use the most familiar distro. All kernels after 5.4 work well for me. The kernel update in general is not a big deal.
We need hw video deconding for sound over hdmi? I guessed sound is pushed from player to alsa already,but have no alsa device/codec for further processing
Thanks Alex for the info about video decoding. trying to figure out network and Mac address. I will start playing around with Debian buster 5.4 kernel on your Google drive frank. Can’t find an image with 5.10. And don’t know much about compiling or updating or whatever.
