I am looking for any real-world information that might be available on the M7. Information for this board is very sparse. As usual, BPI talks up the board’s technical capabilities without speaking toward what capabilities are actually accessible to the user:
I am considering one for use as a home media player. So read these questions with that in mind.
- Is it possible to boot from MicroSD and/or NVME? The main review BPI links to suggests not.
- Does any software expose the hardware HEVC encoder? Is there an ffmpeg build (outside some languishing github fork somewhere) that can access it?
- What software exposes the hardware decoders? Can VLC use it? Can Kodi? When I ask that, I mean can VLC in any modern OS build use it, not the patched VLC included in the ancient Debian 11 image BPI offers.
- What kernels are available, and who maintains them? I’m asking this with the assumption that proper mainline support is likely not forthcoming given Rockchip’s dislike of open source.
- Has anyone seen more than 900KiB/s real-world transfer speed on the “2.5GB” ethernet?
Honestly I’m thinking that a simple Raspberry PI 5 is likely better supported now in Pi OS and with mainline support in 6.18. But again, I’m willing to be shown this is incorrect.