[Nobbler]

Ah righty. So as it's not a 'proven' hardware yet, it's not going to be an immediate choice; compared to something like a Chromebox (which has already proven itself) - Rather than being another in the long line of iffy devices that look to be cheap-n-nasty

Makes sense - Thanks for the clarification. It's a choice of something in the cheap end (Like the Fire devices or the RPi's, which work but are a little limited), something in the middle (Like the WeTek - which doesn't seem to have the limitations, but has yet to prove itself in the long-run), or something in the higher bracket (Asus Chromebox, NUC's, or the like - which can do everything we need, but just happen to be on the higher side of the cost scale)

[Ned Scott]

To make it even more confusing, devices using Intel's inexpensive Bay Trail Z3735 line of chips are now flooding the market in the $100 price range, and have the benefit of being x86 hardware, which is typically a much more stable platform for Kodi. There's a number of sticks and boxes coming out, and there's even this guy at $120 who is technically a Windows Tablet, but has HDMI and USB ports, making it work just as good as many other "boxes":


http://www.microcenter.com/product/43749...et_-_Black

I don't know how hard it would be to run something like OpenELEC on there, but even if you were stuck with Windows, it would make for a pretty nice Kodi set up. A box that can be an entire portable media center if you ever need to take it with you.

[Matt Devo]

To make it even more confusing, devices using Intel's inexpensive Bay Trail Z3735 line of chips are now flooding the market in the $100 price range, and have the benefit of being x86 hardware, which is typically a much more stable platform for Kodi. There's a number of sticks and boxes coming out, and there's even this guy at $120 who is technically a Windows Tablet, but has HDMI and USB ports, making it work just as good as many other "boxes":


http://www.microcenter.com/product/43749...et_-_Black

I don't know how hard it would be to run something like OpenELEC on there, but even if you were stuck with Windows, it would make for a pretty nice Kodi set up. A box that can be an entire portable media center if you ever need to take it with you.

the issue with a lot of these BayTrail devices is that they use a 32-bit UEFI firmware with no legacy option, so you can't boot/install OE, which uses a 64-bit EFI bootloader. On the plus side, Win10 isn't completely terrible on them.

[noggin]

My experience with the Pipo X7 is mixed. It cam with Win 8.1 with Bing pre-installed (and 12 months Office 365 which isn't to be sneezed at for the price) As a little Windows box it's very good. Netflix HD streams with DD+ audio over HDMI with no problems.

Kodi installs and runs, but high quality stuff at 50fps causes skipped frames (it appears due to CPU thermal throttling). There isn't a heatsink on the Atom SoC in the Pipo (there are in the Zotac and the Neo Z64 it appears) so this may be an issue. The Meegopad T01 also apparently gets too hot and throttles. (At least one person has installed a heatsink and fan on their's - which is a bit odd in an HDMI stick)

In Windows you get HDMI 8 channel audio with DD/DTS/DD+ bitstreaming - but no reported DTS HD HR/MA or Dolby True HD (same as N2820 Baytrail) If / when we get 32bit UEFI support for OpenElec we'll see if the HD Audio situation improves as it has on the N2820 - though the Fedora and Ubuntu 32bit UEFI installs don't have HDMI audio support at the moment.