Anthias installs on Armbian and other 64-bit ARM boards, as best effort

A Rock Pi, Orange Pi or Banana Pi running Debian-based Armbian can now run Anthias, as best effort. Images and web pages work on any of these boards, and video works on the Rock Pi 4.

May 28, 2026

If you have a Rock Pi, Orange Pi or Banana Pi in a drawer, you can now run Anthias on it, as best effort. Images and web pages work on any of these boards, and video works on the Rock Pi 4.

Before, install.sh stopped with "Unsupported Raspberry Pi model" on anything that wasn't a Raspberry Pi or an x86 PC. From Anthias 2026.05.1 it treats any other 64-bit ARM (aarch64) board as a generic arm64 device, skips the Raspberry Pi boot changes (config.txt, cmdline.txt), and installs the same web interface, scheduler and viewer. The boards named in the project's README as tested are the Rock Pi 4, Rock 5, Orange Pi 5 and Banana Pi M5.

What to know before you try it

• Use the Debian-based Armbian image for your board (Bookworm or Trixie). The installer sets up Docker from Docker's Debian repository, so an Ubuntu-based Armbian image fails at the first apt update.
• On a generic arm64 board, Anthias refuses video uploads, because it can't tell which codecs the board handles. Images and web pages work.
• The Rock Pi 4 is the 1 board Anthias recognizes by name. It accepts H.264 and HEVC uploads there, and decodes them in software. In the project's testing, 1080p H.264 dropped about 1 frame every 14 seconds, while 1080p HEVC dropped about a fifth of its frames.
• Audio goes to the system's default ALSA device. If your HDMI output needs something else, set it in ~/.asoundrc.
• The Anthias boot splash usually doesn't show on these boards, so the kernel's boot messages stay on screen until the viewer starts.
• Wired network interfaces named end0, common on Armbian, are recognized, so the splash screen shows the board's IP address.