raspberry-pi-pcie-devices VS enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding

Generally yes. M.2 wifi cards are just PCI-E (except for Intel CNVio). Jeff Geerling tried a bunch of different PCI-E cards with the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module which does expose the PCI-E interface: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/

We're also trying to preserve the utility of older cards by getting at least portions of the drivers working on alternate platforms (like arm64), so they can be repurposed for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding, retro gaming, GPU compute, etc.: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...

The current answer is maybe: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...

The PCIe implementation on the 5 is supposedly more complete/less broken than on the CM4, but so far the only person crazy/inspired enough to test hasn't gotten back to this card with their Pi 5 setup.

Just a note that if you're _serious_ about WiFi on the Raspberry Pi... you should use an external WiFi adapter—either PCIe or USB.

With the Compute Module 4, I've successfully tested a variety of adapters [1], from WiFi 6E to older mini PCIe and M.2 cards. There's even a board made for the purpose of multi-WiFi testing, the Seaberry [2].

The Raspberry Pi 5 works with all the PCIe WiFi chips I've tested (haven't had time to summarize testing on pipci database site yet, including a mt7921u-based WiFi 6E USB adapter (haven't written that up, but check out [3]).

[1] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#network-cards-nics-and-wifi-...

[2] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/seaberry.html

[3] https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/issues/137#issuecomment...

https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com honestly I'd get a home server and run HA through docker, it's gotten me into home servers.

The simplest access you can get would be by using a CM board (as that has PCI Express available on its connectors) but driver issues galore exist. AMD have been more open the the "greenies" but the closest result I have seen is documented by Jeff Geerling

Are you familiar with a YouTuber named Jeff Geerling? He does some pretty far out stuff with pi’s like connecting video cards to them, etc. here’s a videoabout stuff you could do, I haven’t watched it myself. He’s got this website that has a list of accessories he’s tried with the pi. While I was looking for his channel I saw a ton of videos on YouTube for stuff to do with the pi. Curious to see what you end up doing… I guess I’m kinda hoping you do something that utilizes the full potential of the 4 😁

Most devices can indeed most likely handle software decode of more common resolutions, codecs and bitrates. But I'd really hope they'd pick the one that won't suck up all the battery, so H264. This line of thought is supported by the fact that YouTube still provides an H264 option with most if not all videos.

With higher bitrate things, HEVC seems to grow in popularity but even software decode support is not everywhere. Netflix for example requires the installation of HEVC support on Windows to play 4K content.

Actually hardware-accelerated video decode is even spottier and more unreliable across most platforms. The JS API for codec support (canPlayType) literally returns "maybe" and "probably". It's quite bad.

So far the best compatibility I've seen has been Edge with flags on Windows (MPEG-2, H264, HEVC, AV1, VP8, VP9 with most also supporting accelerated encode). It still fails with some content (Dolby Vision P5 colors are incorrect, HEVC Rext doesn't play - more info about HEVC is available here https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...). Chrome on macOS is a close second in terms of codec support.

The worst in terms of HW acceleration being all the browsers on desktop Linux-s, few and fragile combinations that offer limited and janky support. But it's slowly improving. This combined with the not-the-latest hardware many use, means things like VP9 or AV1 tend to stutter.

I'd love to see some more generic stats, but considering the APIs aren't sufficient to determine actual support, these might be difficult to gather.

> The 'right' solution would be to just use system codecs for everything. Many apps need good implementations of image codecs. They just need to be implemented once by the OS vendor (or the toolkit on Linux).

Windows has done this and is still doing this, but the decade-long track history so far is that this does not work well. It can work, in a very limited scope and if you have a lot of influence.

Sure, it's really nice if an 8K@60Hz HDR HEVC video plays perfectly straight in your browser or desktop app, but more often than not, it just won't. You don't have the right browser, the extension installed (due to license agreements), good enough graphics drivers or someone has forgotten a flag yet again.

And we haven't even gotten to the immense amount of variation each codec introduces or the potential attack surface.

How shit the situation is with just HEVC (and thus also basically HEIC): https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...

> Just file a bug against your OS.

In the end that "just" carries a lot of burden, it can't be the users reporting these issues.

It's just way easier to leech off of ffmpeg and similar, and let it deal with all the formats. Instead of hoping that maybe you can leverage what the OS gives you, that it works and works correctly in all your edge-cases.

Though not everything is that gloomy, there are Vulkan extensions that might (in the future) simplify cross-platform image and video decoding (and HW acceleration).

I think there are a few patches that can enable HEVC hardware decoding with chromium. Though I am a firefox user so I didn't test whether these patches works or not. https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...