New pinebook owner, media playback how? (was: larger eMMC, what and how to install?)

[Luke]

battery life isn't great ? then something is wrong; perhaps the biggest selling point of the PB for the average user is battery life. I get approx. 7-8hrs of battery life on my unit.

Open with is ok, but if you use Firefox then this is better

[dahni]

this is better

that's a highly subjective way of saying it.
anyhow why should i limit myself to VLC, which has proven to be rather resource-hungry on many occasions?

Oh Linux, land of choices - I found another distro that makes my pinebook happy: armbian's pinebook edition.
That one also ships with a recent version of mpv.

[Luke]

this is better

that's a highly subjective way of saying it.
anyhow why should i limit myself to VLC, which has proven to be rather resource-hungry on many occasions?

Oh Linux, land of choices - I found another distro that makes my pinebook happy: armbian's pinebook edition.
That one also ships with a recent version of mpv.

How fully featured is armbian for the PB these days ? - I havent checked in some time.

[dahni]

it uses a slightly reduced xfce desktop; i personally find it nicer & lighter than the ubuntu mate setup.
they didn't disable compositing by default, but i had the feeling it's responsive enough even so. in any case, a small step to change that.

the setup/install to emmc procedure is nice: you are asked to provide a username/password, the user is then created.

fully featured? sure, it has package management tools & you install whatever you want. afaics, there's an armbian repo and ports.ubuntu, backports fully enabled as usually with ubuntu.
i have the vague impression that the armbian repositories are better groomed and larger than the ones from pine.org/uk, maybe because they support a larger range of devices.
the previously mentioned recent version of mpv for one, but of course also VLC and smplayer are available.
chromium, firefox, but no palemoon (yet). might need to tackle that one myself.

i compiled a recent version of tint2 (it's also in the repos, but i need some features from the newer version) without a problem, so that also works.
i'm so used to intel architecture, i wasn't sure it would.

[dahni]

I was wrong about the battery life.
It seems that installing things, working with usb and external hard drive, writing imasges etc., drains the battery even more than media playback.
now i've been doing just system maintenance & light usage (not much internet) for a while, and battery life is very satisfactory! from days to a week, whether i switch off or suspend.