BenCranston

I know the OP is talking about leveraging the video acceleration, so I wanted to throw in a few of my experiences...
 
For a faster desktop experience (which is not what I understand is the focus of Armbian) you want to install the fbturbo_drv Xorg driver.  Instructions for that can be found here:  http://linux-sunxi.org/Xorg
This works with or without the Cedar and MALI drivers.  Typical desktops used on ARM platforms don't use compositing and therefore get no real boost from these drivers.  the Cedar (vdpau) driver is the one for accelerated video playback.  It uses the NEON functions.  There's a great writeup here: http://www.cnx-software.com/2013/12/10/most-embedded-gpus-do-not-support-hardware-video-decoding-acceleration-the-vpu-does/ 
 
I was recently *chastised* by one of the authors of the lima driver, which is reverse engineering of the ARM MALI binary blob, for asking for video acceleration via the MALI subsystem...  
 
I've used the guides here: https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=5979 and here: https://blog.eldajani.net/banana-pi-arch-linux-accelerated-mali-gpu/ to get both Cedar and Mali to work.  The caveat is that both of these methods rely on vendor provided proprietary binary blobs that are only compatible with the 3.4 kernel...
 
I've found the same issues that RagnerBG pointed out regarding mplayer having the vdpau components not compiled in the repository.  The steps outlined in the previous post work for me as well.
 
Anyway, apologies for the rambling..  good day all!

Absolutely!  As it turns out my issue (I'll argue the driver still has a *bug* but will 100% concede it has nothing to do with Arabian or your excellent built) was that my access point was allowing for the legacy 802.11b data rates.  Once I limited it to only 802.11g data rates, then the radio in the Banana Pro works great.  the issue is really deep in the driver and not limited to the brcmfmac driver as it would fail with the ap6210 driver on older kernels as well.  I tried several of the LeMaker posted or linked distros and they all had the same issue.  An AP supporting the old 802.11b data rates will cause it to fail.  If for kicks anyone wants to see if they can reproduce the issue, go into their access point an enable 1, 2, 5.5 & 11 megabit data rates.  I'd bet that on attempt to associate the driver fails.