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"So it doesn't work out of the box then?"

Video decoding acceleration does work on A10/A20/H3 with the legacy 3.4 kernel out of the box. I believe that you can even find some ready made SD card images. And you can track the mainlining effort at https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus

"AllWinner is a GPL violator"

You are just cherry-picking statements and severely exaggerating them. Every major hardware vendor has its own skeletons in a closet. Maybe you can remember Linus Torvald's middle finger to NVIDIA and things like this. Allwinner is definitely not a saint, but is still far from the worst. If you want to vent out your hatred, then I can give you some better targets.

"Allwinner does NOT cooperate with the linux-sunxi community. At all."

This is not exactly true. They are at least providing the documentation and also their open source code drops. Some people (mainly the devboard manufacturers) have contacts with Allwinner.

I don't think that you know what you are talking about. Please check the https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort page.

Every new mainline kernel release includes improvements for Allwinner chips. Older Allwinner chips, such as A10 and A20, are already supported very well. The support for newer chips is progressing nicely, but there is always a bit of delay.

Yes, you can't expect this newly released Orange Pi PC 2 board to be already supported in the mainline kernel today. But maybe half a year later everything is likely going to be much better. And even right now, there should be some sort of a legacy 3.10 kernel available too, so it is not like you can't use the board at all.

The datasheets are released and you can freely download them. For the Allwinner A64 documentation (another 64-bit SoC, which is very similar to H5) you can check https://linux-sunxi.org/A64#Documentation

And no, it is not a "stolen" or "leaked" documentation (I have actually seen such ridiculous claims in the phoronix forum). It is hosted on the Pine64 website with the permission from Allwinner. And the Pine64 people specifically asked Allwinner to remove the misleading "confidential" watermarks from the PDF files.

Allwinner H5 is very new and this Orange Pi PC 2 board is probably the very first piece of hardware using it. But I expect that the H5 documentation will become available in public access shortly. Just like the documentation for the older Allwinner chips. Maybe initially with the "confidential" watermark again, because the Allwinner people are a little bit lazy and don't seem to understand why the open source people are making so much fuss about this.

The Kodi people are not to be trusted on this matter, it's just an ugly political game. See http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=1497&pid=13513#pi... And also https://github.com/linux-sunxi/libvdpau-sunxi if you are actually interested in a working hardware accelerated video decoding. To sum it up, hardware video decoding acceleration works fine with fully open source drivers on Allwinner hardware, but the Kodi application just does not want to use them. Fortunately there are also other open source media players, which can do the job.

As for the lubuntu image, anyone can take any ARM Linux distribution rootfs and combine it with the Linux kernel, built for Allwinner hardware (both mainline and legacy kernels exist). You can find a lot of tutorials at https://linux-sunxi.org

But if you are not a very experienced user, I strongly suggest you to try something like the armbian distribution first.