Armbian - Xenial Desktop (Pinebook)

[dkryder]

^ fwiw, armbian is not old & outdated - it's based on ubuntu 16.04, which is still the current LTS version and supported until April 2021: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

But it's interesting you were experiencing similar trouble. Were you refering to the screenshot i took?

i'm having problems with video playback after a not-so-recent (i think i did it in october) upgrade.

before that, all video would look normal, and most video would playback with only minimal framedrop.

now, most only display like this
this is with mpv, and its output is something like this - looks ok to me???
but the problems are abundant with all video formats and media players (mplayer too, and i spent a good while playing with VLC's settings).

i tried:

downgrading kernel back to 3.10.105 version == downgrading packages linux*pine* to version 5.31.
it helped a little - i was able to watch a few very old & lo-res episodes.

then i found this: Video playing will break on sunxi legacy unless adding cma=96M to kernel boot parameter, so i undid the downgrade and added that option to /boot/boot.cmd & recompiled, after which i could see those 96M in 'dmesg|grep -i cma' (was 64M before).
but it did not help at all, the situation was just as bad as before the kernel downgrade!

what to do?

pine64 is sun50i, probably not covered by that change, but i'm not sure what effect "cma=96M" would have on pine64. but that offers no help to your issue. video can usually be improved by using a good quality 32gb or larger sd card, using emmc, or move root filesystem to ssd or 7200rpm hd. depending on software used there may be config settings that can also help. but those color problems are very strange. are using a dvi monitor?

finally i get some time to come back to this!
i have little more to offer by way of troubleshooting:
The problem (see screenshot from previous post, garbled colors) seems to only occur with some old AVIs and MP4s.
I was hoping to narrow it down to one video codec, but not sure. maybe Xvid.
Of the problematic videos, most still play with mplayer (but in software decoding i guess, because the system load is larger), but not in mpv.
but there's a few cases that show the same problems in all 3 players installed: mpv, mplayer, vlc.
here's the image one more time.

mpv seems to indicate hardware decoding (vdpau) for all affected videos - although it is a little unclear whether it couldn't also refer to audio. i think not. look at the output.

so that would make it clearly a problem with the graphics chip & driver.

i have tested remote & local videos, but the issue is the same (only more buffering problems with remote video, no surprises there).

i think the recent update you mentioned probably messed up you video files. i'd suggest starting over with the most recent stable version and then if it works ok just do not update or upgrade your system. it would be ok to update non-video files on a case by case basis, like individual non-video programs. but i think you somehow messed up your install somehow maybe mis-matched files dealing with video.