High CPU on video playback (Anthias Docker on Raspberry Pi 5)

Anthias
1

Hi everyone! I’m looking for help and to know if anyone faced the same issue.

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi 5 Model B – 4 GB RAM
  • Waveshare PCIe-to-M.2 Adapter with PoE
  • Official Raspberry Pi NVMe SSD 256 GB

OS & Setup

  • Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Bookworm), fully updated
  • Anthias running in Docker (Pi5 images, latest tags)
  • Followed raspberry-pi5-ssd-install-instructions.md

Issue

  • Full HD videos are played by ffplay

  • CPU usage jumps to constant 80–90% during playback

  • The fan gets very loud when CPU maxes out

  • Example process:

    image
    image698×173 7.29 KB

What I tried

  • Converted assets to HEVC (hvc1)

Comparison

  • Balena image: playback is smooth (no high CPU)
  • Raspberry Pi 4 with Anthias Docker: playback is smooth
  • Problem only on Raspberry Pi 5

How can I enable hardware-accelerated playback on Pi 5 with the Anthias Docker viewer?

Is there a way to force VLC, or recommended ffplay flags to use hardware HEVC decode on Pi 5?

Thanks in advance!

2

@6_HP_9, Anthias is currently using ffplay for the Raspberry 5 to play videos.

VLC is an option. However, a fair bit of work might be needed.

3

Thanks for the clarification.

I’m OK staying with ffplay on Raspberry Pi 5. I just need hardware decode so CPU (and the fan) don’t spike on 1080p. Not sure if it’s even possible.

I have a few questions though:

  1. Is there a config or env var to pass extra ffplay args from docker-compose? For example, adding -vcodec hevc_v4l2m2m when the file is HEVC.

  2. If not, is there a supported place to inject custom player flags (config file, hook, or override script) without forking?

  3. For the VLC option, is there a dev tag/branch I can test? Also, could you elaborate on the “fair bit of work”? I might give it a try.

Thanks

4

@6_HP_9, I tried to get inside the anthias-viewer container and run videos via VLC but there’s no audio or video. By fair bit of work, I mean trying things like installing an X server and configuring VLC to start via the X11 by setting DISPLAY to :0 (e.g., export DISPLAY=:0). Feel free to try ffplay with X11 if you’d like to explore as well.

5

Thanks again. I’ll give it a try and share it, if I’m successful.