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Buyers beware: No hardware h264 video encoding 🙁

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It's fun to play with the Google Coral 5MP Camera via the two MIPI-CSI connections with a monitor attached, but it's really useless in any kind of recording or NVR capacity after you're done having fun for two days.

This is because the €200 Asus Tinker Edge T has a Vivante GC7000 Lite GPU, which does not have a hardware H264 encoder. You can encode 720p H264 at 5fps using the superfast preset, and forget using the CPU for anything else. It will be overloaded.

I'm really disappointed this €200 dev board is outperformed by the 10 year old Raspberry Pi in this capacity, and even a €5 Raspberry Pi Nano W. That's because all Raspberry Pi's and Nano editions have the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU with dedicated H264 encoding support. It was really made with the MIPI connector and the camera module in mind. The Coral TPU is the main benefit of course, but you are considerably better off buying the stand alone USB-attached Coral and use it with a Raspberry 4.

Edited by devboard

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For reference:

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -video_size 1280x720 -framerate 30 -i /dev/video1 -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -t 10 out.264

It's really too bad that this 24 pin Google Coral 5MP Camera isn't compatible with Raspberry Pi 22 pin MIPI. Otherwise you could recycle the camera to use with a €15 Raspberry Pi Nano 2 W with rtsp-simple-server installed and use it as a wifi camera. It would run circles around the Asus Tinker Edge T.

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