SoM/SoC with h264 hardware encode/decoding and camera inteface

[Thalhammer]

Hello,

Not sure if this is the right subforum, so feel free to move it.

I'm searching for a System on Module / SoC which contains a hardware h264 encoder and decoder supporting at lease 1080p@30fps.
In addition, I need a camera interface which is able to record 1080p@30.
So far so simple, there are a lot of possible Socs out there that have the hardware to do this, however, the software side for most is either not existent or broken/incomplete.
The best fit so far is the Rpi compute module (in fact that's what I use for testing right now),
however, I could not find a shop where I can buy more than one at a time, which is no big deal during development, but a dealbreaker for production.
In addition, it misses some nice to have features like secure boot/OTP and if I choose to integrate the SoMs components into the baseboard to consolidate the design I can't do it as the used SoC is not available on the free market.

The following socs are what I looked into already:

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3
+ Lots of information on the web
+ 2 CSI Ports
+ Working Software
- No secure boot
- Hard to get in quantity > 1
- SoC is not available on free market/Broadcom does not care about companies with < 10000 units

SoPine
+ Based on common SoC
+ Easy to get
+ Cheap
- Bad Software support

Allwinner SoC general
+ Good availability
+ Cheap
+ More modern than Rpi
+ Some chips even hand solderable (http://linux-sunxi.org/V3s)
- Bad software support*

NXP i.MX6
+ Seems to be able to do all I need, however I could not find good information
- Software support ?

NXP i.MX8
+ Definitely can do what I need
- Software support

* There is some documentation there: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
But as of now I did not find a way to directly encode camera => h264 the way I do on Rpi.

I feel like I'm currently running against a wall. 1080p h264 does not seem like such a big deal considering every smartphone can do it nowadays.
Do you have any tips/information I am missing?

Sincerely Thalhammer

[Hydron]

Have you looked into Hisilicon (Huawei) SoCs?
No idea about the software support, ease of purchase etc, but I do know that they are very common in CCTV cameras for interfacing to image sensors and doing the subsequent encoding and networking stuff.
TI also have their davinci platform with hardware encoders etc, but I'm not sure how well supported that is these days. Beaglebones are also TI based but a different family of chips who's name escapes me (starts with s) - they certainly have easily available silicon and software but I'm not sure if they include an encoder.

/Ramble

[tsman]

I could not find a shop where I can buy more than one at a time, which is no big deal during development, but a dealbreaker for production.

Eh? Are you sure you're not thinking of the Raspberry Pi Zero which usually has a 1 per order limit? You can buy as many Compute Modules you want direct from Farnell/RS and they don't have any quantity restrictions.

[Thalhammer]

You can buy as many Compute Modules you want direct from Farnell/RS and they don't have any quantity restrictions.

I could if they were available. If I visit e.g. farnell it says "Lieferung wird erwartet" which translates to "Awaiting shipment" which means the have none in stock, doesn't it ?
However this still leaves the missing Security features.

Have you looked into Hisilicon (Huawei) SoCs?

Not yet but I will now.

[tsman]

I could if they were available. If I visit e.g. farnell it says "Lieferung wird erwartet" which translates to "Awaiting shipment" which means the have none in stock, doesn't it ?

Yes. They're backordered because they're still fairly new. RS has stock arriving on 21/03/19 if you need a CM3+. No quantity limitation.

However this still leaves the missing Security features.

Yes. There is no secure boot. At least not publicly. The SoC does appear to have the ability to verify a signed bootloader but there is no documentation on how to use it. The big firmware blob has multiple references to setting boot keys in OTP ROM. They only publicly document 8 of the 66 OTP registers.

Embest who is owned by Farnell will do custom Raspberry Pi based boards for you with a MOQ of 3000 but it won't be cheap.

NXP i.MX6
+ Seems to be able to do all I need, however I could not find good information
- Software support ?

i.MX6 and i.MX7 has/had a flawed secure boot implementation. It is possible to craft a fake certificate which disables the signature verification. They were going to do a new silicon revision to fix this flaw but I don't know what the status of that is. Some of their older chips like the i.MX53 have the same flaw but AFAIK they didn't fix those.

[thm_w]

https://octopart.com/search?q=cm3%2B&category_ids=4267&start=0

Some reasonable stock depending on the version (8, 16, 32GB).