RK3328 Buster Legacy - VPU module issues

Hello Everyone!

I cannot get Gstreamer to use video acceleration on my ROC-RK3328-CC (Libre Renegade)
rockchip-gstreamer from Rockchip's github page just wont let me compile the vpudec plugin

I have tried both stretch and buster with 4.4 legacy kernel (currently on buster), but I seem to be missing one peice.

Here's what I do:
-Install a current Armbian Renegade Legacy image, and install all the tools necessary to compile everything.
-Git Clone and compile: Gstreamer, plugins-base, plugins-good, plugins-bad, plugins-ugly, plugins-libav
-Git Clone and compile: libmali, mpp, rockchip-gstreamer, rockchip-gstreamer-extra

during mpp compilation, I get the following warning:
 

[ 71%] Building CXX object mpp/legacy/CMakeFiles/rockchip_vpu_static.dir/vpu_api_legacy.cpp.o
/home/onev/video/mpp/mpp/legacy/vpu.c: In function ‘VPUClientInit’:
/home/onev/video/mpp/mpp/legacy/vpu.c:104:14: warning: this statement may fall through [-Wimplicit-fallthrough=]
         type = VPU_DEC;
         ~~~~~^~~~~~~~~
/home/onev/video/mpp/mpp/legacy/vpu.c:105:5: note: here
     case VPU_DEC:
     ^~~~
[ 71%] Building C object mpp/legacy/CMakeFiles/rockchip_vpu_static.dir/vpu_mem_legacy.c.o

When I run './autogen.sh' for rockchip-gstreamer it says that vpudec will not be compiled due to unmet dependencies.

configure: *** Plug-ins with dependencies that will be built:
    rockchipmpp

configure: *** Plug-ins with dependencies that will NOT be built:
    rkximage
    vpudec

So I look at the configure.ac file, and I see it only has one dependency, and that is rockchip_vpu version 0.3.0 - [rockchip_vpu < 0.3.0]

So I check my /dev folder and both vpu_service and rkvdec devices are present.

lsmod shows neither modules are loaded, so I first do rkvdec:

sudo modprobe rkvdec

and that works, as lsmod now shows the rk_vcodec module is loaded.

next I do the vpu_service module:

sudo modprobe rockchip_vpu

and that returns to prompt with no error message, but the module is still not listed by lsmod (nothing for vpu)

So just for the heck of it, I edit the configure.ac to allow vpudec to compile without checking the dependency, and of coarse there's a bunch of errors.
This suggests that I'm missing something, possibly a library I'm overlooking?

Or perhaps its that the Rockchip Ayufun branch (which is the branch armbian installs) of the official rockchip branch of the kernel, doesn't have the latest updates from the rockchip branch?

Does anyone have any ideas about what I'm missing here?

Any hints would be sincerely appreciated