CLI videoplayer and HTML5 questions

[nickehallgren]

Hi,

I have been using RPi's for over a year and I bought a A20 micro last week. I'm think on developing a digital signage solution and have a few questions.

Is there a equivalent to the omxplayer for the Olimex A20 platform? A cli videoplayer with HW decoding that does not require X?

What about a HTML5 browser that makes use of the GPU for rendering. I tried Midori and Iceweasel but both seemed almost as slow as the RPi. Iceweasel also consumed alot of CPU when testing fullscreen dissolve of images and still not very smooth animations. Chrome or chromium was the next to test but I didn't find it anywhere, do I have to compile it myself or is there a repository from where I can install it?

Thanks in advance!

[progmetalbg]

Hi,

For command line video player with HW decoding acceleration you can try VLC:
http://linux-sunxi.org/VLC
Note that I don't have experience with it (never tried it) and it seems that the git repo is abandoned (no updates for 1+ year) and there is a list with bugs ... and also it requires some manual effort to install it.

As for fast HTML5 browser on A20-OLinuXino-MICRO ... well dual core Cortex-A7 at 912 MHz (default speed) is not a speed demon. I recently tried Android 4.2 on my board and Chrome, Firefox and Opera were just slow, especially on more complex pages. Overclocking CPU to 1.1 GHz improved browsing experience. GPU acceleration for desktop/2D/X is seriously lacking for all ARM SoCs on Linux at the moment.
Everything is computed by the CPU.
There is a closed source X server which developers claim that is faster than Xorg on ARM processors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T18FhSTQ08k

[nickehallgren]

Ok, I'll take a look at it. Thanks!