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!

Great work putting this together — the mpp→vaapi bridge is the piece most people skip, and having it in a PPA with a patched gnome-remote-desktop for hardware H.264 encode is genuinely useful for anyone running RK3588 headless over RDP. We use RK3588 in industrial digital signage and edge devices , and the MPP + RGA pipeline you've packaged here is essentially the same stack we rely on for multi-stream hardware decode in commercial displays. A couple of observations from production: 1.  CMA allocation: If you're running multiple concurrent decode sessions (e.g., 3+ 1080p streams), the default CMA size on the Armbian Ubuntu image may not be enough. We typically set cma=256M (or higher for 4K decode). Worth checking cat /proc/meminfo | grep Cma if you hit MPP_ERR_ALLOC under load.  2.  RDP encode bitrate: For the gnome-remote-desktop h264_rkmpp path, have you experimented with bitrate/quality settings? In our remote maintenance scenarios, dropping to 4 Mbps with -b:v 4M gives a good balance between visual quality and thermal headroom on fanless enclosures.  One question: have you tested the vaapi bridge with Firefox as well, or only Chrome? Firefox's VA-API path (media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled) can be picky about the driver reporting format. Thanks for sharing the PPA — this fills a real gap while Armbian sorts out the Rock 5B image situation.