Orange Pi 5 Review – Powerful, No WiFi

Hey MattB,

Ahh yes, I love it when the AV applications do that. That happens a lot when I’m casting to my Sony Android TV from VLC Media Player within Linux. It will look like it should be playing in VLC and nothing will be going to the TV and it will just be black. Everything will look like it is working normally while nothing is happening on the TV whatsoever.

The only way I was able to diagnose and fix mine was using the log files. I’m sure Kodi can handle all of those things. Check this page out on where the Kodi log files will go and how to configure settings related to them. Once I did so with my situation I found messages related to codecs and other settings that let me get things working correctly after that. Before that I was completely flying blind which is a frustrating feeling for sure.

It looks roughly like you’ll create a file called advancedsettings.xml with the logging level turned up and then it will create a log file showing us what it’s doing behind the scenes. Most likely this will lead you to some sort of configuration or codec issue but the debug info you get from the logs will be a *huge* help to figure out what isn’t configured quite right. It could absolutely have to do with the Orange Pi Android distribution and the log file errors should give us a place to start at least to figure out whether that’s the case or if this is some easy permissions issue or some other setting to deal with.

It looks like the log files will be created at one of the following possible locations:

/data/org.xbmc.kodi/cache/temp/kodi.log
/sdcard/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/temp/kodi.log
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/temp/kodi.log

There might be some of these created by default but if there are any it will probably be a pretty low logging level (not showing a lot of info) without creating the advancedsettings.xml file with settings telling it to tell you *everything* that is going on.

It also goes without saying that you need to be using a HDMI cable that is actually capable of doing 4K 60Hz and you need an even better one if you actually try to do 8K 60Hz (I wouldn’t recommend 8K for video, probably just a kiosk display, most PCs can’t do flawless 8K output at 60Hz so it seems literally impossible this could be flawless on a <$100 device). Something like the PS5 or Xbox Series X bundled HDMI cable would do it (for 4K 60Hz for sure and I know the consoles can theoretically output 8K 60Hz if Microsoft/Sony unlocked it but I don't know if they shipped a cable rated for it). Cables this new and up to spec that are capable of doing this are really not that common relatively speaking as they require a much higher HDMI version than manufacturers were shipping until only a year or two ago so everyone is likely to have literally a decade+ worth of HDMI cables that won't work at these resolutions laying around (and few to none that will). I don't think this is the problem with yours by how you described your setup as it sounds like you're using a setup that you know works with this TV in those resolutions at 60Hz but I figured I better mention it for others who might be coming here later reading this comment. Can you give those steps a try and see what is going on with Kodi behind the scenes in the log files? That should let us help further!

Hey munecito,

Great to see you again! Yes, the WiFi module situation is causing quite a mess at the moment. I did find a workaround but it’s using a E-key to M-key adapter and it’s definitely not pretty. It does work though (for Linux).

There’s definitely no question though that the lack of WiFi is probably the biggest weakness of the board. It’s a bigger weakness than the PCIe 2.0 speeds part. It’s also not good that they didn’t have a pile of 20,000+ of these WiFi modules ready for launch. They seem to be scrambling still to get it offered!

The Orange Pi Zero 2 was the one that started it all, thanks so much! Still a great headless board to this day for the price. The Orange Pi i96 board taught me quite a bit as well and led to the legendary i96 image which has been a cool / fun project.

I have you to thank a lot for the site doing so well. Had I not explored other boards I would really be in a lot of trouble and you sending me the Orange Pi Zero and the Orange Pi i96 (originally to get the Orange Pi Zero 2 working with pibenchmarks.com if I remember correctly) showed me that these boards had got a *lot* closer to the Raspberry Pi in quality and power (I’d argue they’ve passed it at this point, the Pi 4 is a quad-core board and we’ve been past 4 cores on the competition for what, 2 generations?) than I had read or would have believed had I not actually tried them.

Is there more “support” for the Raspberry Pi still? Yes, for now, but we’re working on it and making progress. I’m getting more traffic for some of these new articles on alternative boards than I had been seeing in years for my Raspberry Pi articles (partly because of constantly increasing competition and partly because of the Raspberry Pi becoming more difficult and expensive to buy over time). The comments for alternative boards like this one have been really lively and people have been finding / reporting really good stuff and teaching me new things about other boards I’ve since ordered for review based on what they told me.

Instead of my traffic being down who knows how much now I’m hitting record numbers since I’m about 6 months to a year ahead of the other creators figuring it out. I’m absolutely destroying the rankings and half of the things you google to do with the Orange Pi 5 I will be on the top page now. This won’t last but being early goes a really long way in web rankings. I might not be able to hold the top spot against something like tomshardware but I’ll probably still be in the top 5 years from now for a lot of these things so it definitely matters.

None of the news coming out about the Raspberry Pi or the published interviews with the current CEO have been encouraging about their direction. They seem to not even be looking at RISC-V while Google just announced official Android support for it yesterday. That’s another thing I’m covering almost nobody else is that they will regret in 6-12 months when it will be 5x-10x harder to rank on YouTube or Google than it is now (at least). Right now if you publish something with RISC-V in it you basically go straight to the top of Google and even into people’s Google News feeds because it’s so poorly covered (that’s probably already changing today, it’s all over the news that Google announced their official support from big, big outlets now and I promise you’ll only continue to see more).

RISC-V is basically trying to do for hardware what open source did for software. It’s called “open hardware” meaning anybody can make it (and see ALL the specifications down to each individual CPU instruction, no secrets and no redactions). There’s no crazy patents or all of the horrible closed-source firmware and other practices the manufacturers of other architectures/chips do. RISC-V is trying to do for hardware what open source did for software essentially. It’s not a perfect analogy but just like open source software anyone can download the plans and make it without worrying about patents/royalties/trade wars/all the rest. That is not how hardware works today at all (to all of our detriment). It’s still pretty early but there’s some really cheap decent boards that have come out and some decent mid-high range ones I have ordered for review that I can’t wait to cover.

Some people are really afraid of RISC-V. I see people calling it a “Chinese architecture” and “Chinese processors”. Nonsense. That is straight up fear mongering 100%. It’s an international standard that anyone can make. It’s not a “Chinese” or “American” or “Whatever” architecture/processor and that is literally the entire point. Why is that so awesome? Because all of that licensing / patent / trade war / protectionism nonsense holds technology back and raises the prices for you.

Good luck to anyone trying to scare Google and other major companies with that because they understand what it actually is / what it actually means. They’re already making the investments and shipping RISC-V hardware. Google doesn’t make chips so they hate closed-hardware practices as much as you do. They hate playing those licensing games too and it raises the prices of their products when they have to play ball with those companies. Intel is even offering to make RISC-V hardware for companies interested now (that’s in the XDA developers article I linked above about Android officially supporting RISC-V).

Why has open source software been so awesome? I’d suggest that the answer to that is simply that all of the patents/protectionism/trade secrets hold the industry back. They held software back and over decades of time the open source alternatives continue to prove themselves safer and more reliable. All of those license keys / schemes did not make software better and everyone knows they’re terrible for the end-user experience (especially if they have activation servers that disappear due to them ending support or the company flat out going bankrupt meaning no one can activate the software anymore). So are a lot of these closed-hardware practices. Look how hard it is to switch away from the Pi and how so many of the official accessories won’t even work without the closed-hardware Broadcom secret magic bits. That wouldn’t be a thing with RISC-V.

I am seeing a huge YouTube scramble of people covering the Orange Pi 5 lately. People I’ve never heard of. I imagine some of those are smaller creators like me that jumped on board early as they’re probably more “in touch” since when you’re small the manufacturers don’t send you this stuff and tell you it costs $15 when nobody else can buy it. If one of those YouTubers is reading this I welcome you and will check out your content and even recommend it if I see some good stuff helping build alternative board communities / documentation.

You have a happy new year as well, take care!