yiding

Hi all, Since most of Armbian's Rock 5B images are currently bricked (although hopefully not for too much longer now that we've figured out what the root cause is) I've been using the Ubuntu 26.04 image, which works, but doesn't have hardware video decoding and encoding. Since I wanted to use it with RDP, I needed hardware video encoding at least to make things not super-slow, so I figured, why not port it myself with Claude and Codex. So that's what I did. The kernel and some of the auxillary stuff like ffmpeg, librga, mpp, a mpp -> vaapi bridge, and a gnome-remote-desktop build that encodes using ffmpeg, are all in a PPA. Details here: https://github.com/yisding/rock-5b-ysp/blob/main/docs/ppa-support.md I've been testing it and using it and things are generally working pretty well. But YMMV and have a recovery SD/MMC ready! Cheers!

I'm getting the same serial output stopping in the same place on my board: https://github.com/yisding/rock-5b-ysp/blob/main/findings/2026-07-09-rock5b-armbian-sd-boot-investigation.md Both zeroed out SPI and working (26.5.1) SPI don't boot. Got it to spin up HDMI by dd-ing over some new 26.5.1 bits over to the SD card but still not quite working. Good news is that 26.5.1 Ubuntu 26.04 does boot, and it also has a package for the 6.1 vendor kernel which boots also. I'm sure there's going to be some kernel/userspace mismatch between 6.1 and 26.04 so I've been "vibe-porting" the hardware encoding/decoding drivers to 6.18. Not quite ready yet for distribution, although it does work with ffmpeg and makes gnome-remote-desktop run silky smooth.