If any of you have experienced skipping and popping when seeking with vlc, you can try setting the audio sink to ALSA and one of the rockchip-es8316 options. That will smooth out the audio playback BUT you will quickly discover that anything pulseaudio related is locked out of using the soundcard while vlc is up.

 

Instead, try this. Set vlc audio back to pulseaudio (or automatic, seems to map to the same thing) and then change these two lines in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

 

-; default-sample-rate = 44100
-; alternate-sample-rate = 48000

+default-sample-rate = 48000
+alternate-sample-rate = 44100
 

Restart pulseaudio with systemctl --user restart pulseaudio and see if vlc plays nice with everything else as well as supporting smooth playback after seeking. It does for me. It seems that forcing pulseaudio to resample causes all sorts of hilarity (vlc seems to like putting everything out at 48000). I'm sure there's a reason why. I'm also sure if I know, I'll be sorry I do.

 

I wonder, how hard is it to get the Vulkan video hardware decoding working? Has anyone gotten it to work?

I'm not sure vulkan is the best solution, RK3588, as most ARM SoCs has a dedicated video engine, vulkan is mainly needed on hardware without dedicated engine, using graphic card to decode, as it's often the case in x86_64 worlld. You can then including it's decoding in vulkan if you want. Don't know wich version of kernel/mesa/video decoder you use. The best, is to remove all dedicated package, and use system one, today, everything work fine with standard linux kernel, as armbian one, standard video tools, rockchip specific libs/video tools was used with rockchip made tools, until everything was mainlined.

I don' use VLC, that needs specific libs, but mpv, or several other video players (including firefox one), and everything plays fine.