So much negativity and misinformation here. Orange PI PC boards are well designed, with attention to things that many other board makers fail at, like heat spreading, space for heat sink (you don't really need one usually), quality DC connector, fine grained CPU voltage regulation, USB not being crippled by on-board hub, etc.
Mainline support is also progressing well. With some patches you can get temperature regulation, HDMI support, audio support now on mainline kernel.
Video decoding is also progressing as someone noted in other comments.
SoC on Orange PI PC is also very nice for people who care about not having binary blobs running show on some hidden internal processor. There is additional OpenRISC CPU on the SoC, but it doesn't run by default on mainline kernel, and you can also program it yourself, without too much trouble.
Armbian supports these boards quite well, including video decoding support.
Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for various SoC parts.
Orange PI PC (H3 soc) is quite usable as a desktop for web browsing and audio/video playback.
I'm glad to see H5, because it looks like performance wise it will be still better and I'm also optimistic about the open source software support in the future. It certainly is a very motivating board to develop for at the current price/performance level.
"Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for various SoC parts."
Allwinner does NOT cooperate with the linux-sunxi community. At all.
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.
Mainline support is also progressing well. With some patches you can get temperature regulation, HDMI support, audio support now on mainline kernel.
Video decoding is also progressing as someone noted in other comments.
SoC on Orange PI PC is also very nice for people who care about not having binary blobs running show on some hidden internal processor. There is additional OpenRISC CPU on the SoC, but it doesn't run by default on mainline kernel, and you can also program it yourself, without too much trouble.
Armbian supports these boards quite well, including video decoding support.
Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for various SoC parts.
Orange PI PC (H3 soc) is quite usable as a desktop for web browsing and audio/video playback.
I'm glad to see H5, because it looks like performance wise it will be still better and I'm also optimistic about the open source software support in the future. It certainly is a very motivating board to develop for at the current price/performance level.
The only annoying thing I find is Mali GPU.