I mentioned this in a post on the Mobian board but there were no responses. I don't know if this issue is only with that distribution or if it's more general to the Pinephone's video capabilities.

What I've found is that when playing local video files on the Pinephone it cannot keep up with 1080p, or even 480p playback (though the latter is better). To make videos play smoothly I've had to transcode them down to 240p. (Admittedly I have not tried 360, that might work as well, but 240 looks surprisingly good on the phone's small screen.) This is the case whether using Mobian's default video player or the VLC video player.

Is this something that is likely to improve as development continues, or is it just a limitation of the video hardware?

For anyone else running into this issue, I put together a quick-and-dirty shell script that uses ffmpeg to transcode the video to 240p H.264, preserving the aspect ratio, and copies the audio, from the source mp4 and mkv files in the current directory. The resulting reduced resolution files are placed in a "240" subdirectory.

Hi Y'all,
I have way too many tech toys, and I'm downsizing.  I have an ANSI Pinebook Pro with a 500GB nmve ssd installed.  I'm looking to sell to someone here in the US that's part of the community.  I'll also throw in the eMMC usb adapter.  Send me an offer in a DM if you're interested.
Kevin

SOLD

Hello, pardon if this is the wrong place to post this. I see Manjaro KDE Pinephone is what is now offered in the store for pre-order. If a buyer specifically wanted the Manjaro Convergence package, is finding one on the used market pretty much the only option right now? Any projections on the next pre-order availability of Manjaro Convergence Pinephone?
thank you

I have a PinePhone Manajaro Community Edition and I'm looking forward to ordering a PineBook Pro as soon as the Pine64 store enables orders again. Looking at the specs for its dock (https://pine64.com/product/pinebook-pro-...46c16e2e66

"Power Input: USB-C PD Quick Charge, 60Wat" (sic)

Is that 60 watts at 5 volts? Yikes--that's 12 amps!!!   The Rock64/PB power supply only supplies 3 amps maximum:
https://pine64.com/product/rock64-pinebo...46c16e2e66

Hello,

I was following these instructions to install Arch Linux ARM on my pinebook:

https://www.bencode.net/posts/pinebook/

and when I got to the last step I tried to reboot the computer by turning it off and this triggered the red LED light to turn on. 

I tried typing “reboot” but failed because I was inside chroot.

I have tried to boot from an sd card but failed.

I have tried holding the power button for 20 secs but failed.

Any help will be appreciated.

Hi,
I really really enjoy PBP Manjaro for many months.
Until recently, after I keyed my login password, the login screen continued as usual for a few seconds and then the screen gone blank. I noticed the green LED and noted the laptop is still running, but with a blank screen.
I’m no Linux expert. Please advise what shall I do.
Thanks.

Hello,

I will be putting together a couple of SBC clusters using a whole bunch of SOPine, Clusterboard and Rock64 boards, and having HardROCK64 4GB boards as the control nodes would be perfect.

Is there any news about the availability of HardROCK64 boards, especially the 4GB variant?  Could there be a few available from the preproduction run, for a cool project like this?

Any help would be appreciated.

The UBports and Brave Heart phone owners received a discount to upgrade their phones to the Latest 1.2b revision mainboard.

That brings up the Question,

Will the PMOS phone owners also be allowed a discount to upgrade from the 1.2a  to the 1.2b revision mainboard  ?

It took me a while to collect this information from across various threads and the schematic, so I wanted to summarise it back and hopefully make life easier for other people in future.

I have an A64 LTS (2GB) and I am now powering it from a battery pack made of 4 x 18650 cells in parallel. It's also driving a medium sized LCD which is powered by USB, which resulted in some extra complexity in getting enough power to the USB port. 

So, points to note:

1. Battery temp sensor 
The middle wire on the battery connector either has to be connected to a thermistor or to a 10k resistor connected to GND, otherwise the battery will not charge (still powers things fine though)

2. Power jumpers 
There is a pair of jumpers on the board marked DC5V and BAT. According to the schematic, you should jump DC5V if you are powering just from the DC adaptor (default,) jump BAT if you are powering from battery, or have neither connected if you are powering from both. Since I was intending to use this in a portable device (like a laptop) I assumed "both" was correct and had none of the jumpers connected, however this did not give me enough power to the USB. I had to leave BAT jumpered. This seem to work fine - not sure if anyone would care to elaborate on what this actually does. I can see the DC5V jumper connects the DC adaptor to the 5V line, so I assume having it disconnected means that everything is being powered from the AXP803, but I can't figure out what the BAT jumper is doing... If anyone can explain that one to me, it would be great :-)

3. Charging rates with high power USB devices 
Once the battery was discharged, I was struggling with charging it again. It turns out that the Pine and the USB powered screen together were using almost exactly as much power as the AXP803 was putting out when on battery - actually with loaded CPU it was drawing from the battery even with the power adaptor plugged in which isn't great. Thankfully I could adjust the power draw from the DC adaptor using the following path:

/sys/class/power_supply/axp813-ac/input_current_limit

This was set to 1.5A, though according to the data sheet it supports up to 4A. The next higher supported value was 2A (0.5AS increments), which gave me enough headroom to run the device and charge without having to pull from the battery in high load situations. Massive win. The AXP803 does get warmer from pulling more current when the device is both in use and charging, but I have a 3A DC power supply, a well ventilated case and I added a heatsink to the power chip (an old one off an RPI3 set worked perfectly) so to my mind this is moderately safe... If anyone would like to tell me otherwise I'm all ears.

4. Other useful battery tweaks 
The other useful attributes are in:

/sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/

Check the uevent file in that folder to see a summary of what is available - it includes the remaining capacity (percentage) so I'll be using this to drive a "low battery" LED. Notably here you can change the min/max voltage and the max charging current (default is 1.2A, max is 2.8A according to the data sheet, and it's settable in 0.2A increments.) I've kept these at defaults for now, but I may reduce the maximum charging voltage to 4.1V or lower since I have a tendency to use my battery powered devices plugged in a lot, and this slightly lower voltage should increase battery life. Theoretically I could increase the charging current since my battery pack is around 12Ah, but decided to limit the amount of time the AXP803 is working above "typical" values, so stayed with the default on this.

I hope that's a useful summary for someone in future :-)

Since we can't get balena etcher on the Pinebook Pro is it possible to flash an SD card using the Konsole? Does anyone know how to do this?