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

[dahni]

Thanks everybody!

I have now tried flashing the 0.7.8 release with the pine64-installer (on an x86 machine), and it does not boot either.

so right now I am running ubuntu mate, the 0.6.2 release upgraded to 0.7.8 with the scripts supplied (and I also ran a full "apt-get upgrade" after adding the ppas and running the scripts).

I would stick to 0.6.2 for now. You can get pretty smooth playback in SMplayer - see my SMplayer tweaks thread.

that is the first thing I did.
how smooth exactly?
I have been trying with a few web downloads, h264 in 720 or 1080p resolution, encapsulated in mkv. it was more than choppy with the framebuffer driver, no OSD, no fullscreen; and does not work at all after the upgrade.

I haven't looked into video playback yet. But there is a script in /usr/local/sbin/mplayer-play.sh which configures mplayer, most likely for hardware acceleration.

maybe this doesn't work anymore on the upgraded version, it gives an error that /dev/disp is not writeable...

Youtube isn't without some frame drops on 720p for me on the default setup with chrome. It's okish when I run it in a window, but fullscreen isn't. Maybe directly using mplayer would improve on this area. But videos isn't my primary use.

which release are you getting OKish results on?
and my experience is that chromium plays youtube better than smplayer.

am i asking the impossible here?