I'll leave you to it, then. If it's any use, I have a snapshot of Slarm64-current from 20230910, which works vlc. It would allow you to regress a bit. I'm sure the packages are largely interchangeable. There's been a fair bit of work since then.

Any thoughts on the Pi 5? Mine were that I was impressed with the price, A-76 cores, and increased throughput. I was unimpressed with only 4 cores, & no video driver that I know of. The case looks very amateurish. It seems to absolutely need a fan. I had a Flirc case which dispensed with that requirement, because the cheapskate fan rapidly got noisier than the sound!

Resurrecting an old thread here...

VLC has been broken on Raspberry Pis for quite a while on all the slackware arm distros. Its been weird because sometimes an update would get it working again, and then another one would break it!

I've recently built vlc-3.0.20 and managed to get it working fine on both slarm64-current and slackwareaarch64-current. The trick is to select XVideo out (XCB) rather than the default opengl. By doing this I can play 1080 videos with only around 35% cpu load on all 4 cores.

However, I still cannot use kaffeine, which uses libvlc. Although kaffeine allows passing arguments to libvlc, according to the vlc developers, libvlc won't accept any arguments passed to it! They suggested stopping libvlc from loading the gl plugin, but have offered no advice on how to do this! VLC's "configure --help" offers no options for suppressing opengl while compiling. It appears to be always built by default!

Kaffeine is now working fine for standard definition TV and video files. It can even manage 720 video, but borks on 1080 (as does vlc when set to opengl for video out).

From the above, it seems to be something to do with the way OpenGL interacts with the Pi graphics system. Ffplay and mpv both play 1080 files perfectly, which tells me that its not directly ffmpeg related. I did try rebuilding ffmpeg, but it made no difference.

I have no idea what to try next, but if anyone knows how to stop libvlc loading the gl plugin, I would be interested to hear!

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Pete

I hear you.

I'm having no issues with vlc. I'm on the 2023-09-10 slarm64 image with kernel-6.5.2 & glibc-2.38, although it was compiled against glibc-2.37. I'm using 720p where available. With that, I found even previously difficult tp play mp4s played well, although they wouldn't render previously. sndwvs has a habit of grabbing upstream patches so his 6.5.2 may have included some/all 6.6 stuff. His source has copies of patches applied.

My vlc is 3.0.18 from a year back. I find no difference with 3.0.17.4. Mesa is 23.1.7 & ffmpeg is 5.1.3., Mine is a 1.5GHz Pi 4 overclocked to 1.8GHz, because much more breaks it.

I also have a recent compile of box64, which you compile with the 'SAVE_MEM' option, and that cuts memory consumption drastically on stuff like Zoom (which is x86_64 only). I'd recommend it.

Kernel-6.5.2 has the "nvidia glitch", mentioned elsewhere, which prevents the TV-hat I use on the Pi from working.

Maybe apply the nvidia patch to that source when it comes along? sndwvs does have the source up with any other patches, including upstream ones in all likelihood.

The fix is already in 6.1.57 and above kernels, and I would assume is already in more recent 6.5 kernels too. We haven't had any update to the BCM 2711 kernels for a while. sdnwvs is probably busy with other support, as he seems to be building kernels for a lot of different systems these days! I don't know how he manages to keep up!

Actually, I'm not too bothered as mostly I'm working with slackwareaarch64 with the Pi kernel these days, but I do keep slarm64 up to date as a fall-back. And I still have a soft spot for it, as it was the first slackware system I found for the Pi that had full 64-bit support!

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Pete

I prefer slarm64 because it's an Arm version of slackware, and distributes images dd an image to an sedcard, and you're done.

There's too many x86_64 features in slackware aarch64 for my liking that certainly make it difficult. They have the Slackware bit one place, and the unique booting stuff another. Who needs grub or lilo on a RazPi? I also found the devs a bit prickly, although how much of that is my fault is another matter.

Finally cracked the VLC/Kaffeine issue!

I went into the /usr/lib64/vlc/plugins/video_output folder, and moved everything that had libgl in the filename to a temporary location elsewhere! (12 files altogether)

Now the dropdown folder in VLC no longer offers any GL options, and can be reset to automatic. Also Kaffeine now plays HD and SD TV, and 1080 files without any further issue. Haven't tried any HEVC (X265) stuff, but I wouldn't expect that to work anyway at present. The main thing is that I can now watch and record HD TV again! (Actually, I could record it before! I just couldn't watch it or play it back on the Pi...)

All cores are running at around 35%, so a bit of headroom there.

Next step might be to get X265 working, but that maybe beyond my abilities!

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Pete

x265 has to be installed. It's on git, or Alien's x86_64 repo. Maybe sndwvs has it too.

You just add the lib from Alien's repo in x86_64. Unfortunately, you have to recompile ffmpeg & vlc in slarm64.

I got a clear picture of the compute power on my 2 boxes doing 264-->265 or resolution conversions with ffmpeg. My 6 core x64 box resized at ≅3x with 12 threads and did a one hour video in ~20 mins. My Pi 4 used 4 threads @1.8GHz and resized at ≅0.2x! That's 4-5 hours for a one hour video.

There are a few devs on Slarm64. sndwvs has a few orange Pi 5s as well as a Pi 4. There's at least one Solid Run mini server (16 core NXP chip) helping. I think he has the whole shooting match scripted so he can pull the gits or releases, set things running, and examine them later.

I've had x265 up and running since day 1. The problem is that HEVC en/de-coding needs access to another part of the chip - and details on that are scant! The Pi4/400 is nowhere near powerful enough to do it in software!

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Pete

Another quick update: The only files I actually needed to move out of harm's way were the two libgl_plugin.* files...

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Pete

In older installs of Debian & Slarm64 there was /opt/vc/vcgencmd. The man page showed the syntax for the clock frequency of the GPU sections. Debian could access stuff we couldn't, HEVC notably. So much for open source!

Well you say that, but I recently tried out the latest build of PiOS + their own VLC, and that wouldn't play 4K either! (And I really HATE the *buntu implementations of Linux - they are just like windoze...!)

So even the official OS can't do what the hardware manufacturers claim!

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Pete

the latest PiOS caters also for the Pi 5.

This forum is for the official Slackware port to the ARM architecture. Most Unix geeks prefer to customise their installation heavily, and like all official ports past and present, the Slackware Installer is the easiest and most flexible way to properly achieve this. It also functions as a rescue environment.
We also provide the 'mini root' file systems for development purposes.

Appreciate the feedback. What specifically is difficult? To me it's quite straight forward and fully documented, but that's probably because I know it inside out.

LILO is for x86s only, and the RPi uses U-Boot not GRUB.
If you're interested in the design details, let me know: happy to explain it.

Well the only developers in the last 15 years have been me and mralk3 (Brent). I don't think either of us come across as prickly, but text can always be interpreted in many ways.

Cheers
s.

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