How to do hardware decoding of video?

[mcerveny]

So is there no fleshed out procedure on how to use hardware decoding on this board in Linux yet?

As I wrote hardware acceleration is fully supported on Rock64 (or many other Rockchip devices with MPP libraries).
The right questions:

• Is your video player aware of this ?
  
• Are you ready to configure your video player (ffmpeg based) to use hardware accelerated decoding ?
  • ffmpeg must be compiled with "--enable-rkmpp" and "--enable-libdrm"
    
  • video player must request "h264_rkmpp", "hevc_rkmpp", "vp8_rkmpp" or "vp9_rkmpp" decoder from ffmpeg
    
  • video player must handle/display "AV_PIX_FMT_DRM_PRIME" (DRM DMA buffers) format to render output to DRM plane (best with DRM atomic)
    
• Are you ready to enhance/reprogram/redesign your video player to use hardware accelerated decoding chain ?
  
• Are you able to contact developers of your video player to make this setup for you (for fee, beer or free) ?
  

If not, you should use MPV/KODI/rkplayer instead of your "randomly" chosen video player (from hundreds of available video players).