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sarbes
Team-Kodi Member
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Maybe, but a Raspberry Pi 2 for just 10$ extra overall is a far better choice.
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if this thing wouldn't be Allwinner based, it could be a nice device
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The Allwinner SoC is really horrible kernel support is really horrible got a Cubieboard 2 its mostly collecting dust now learned my lesson the hard way never buying Allwinner SoC again..
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noggin
Posting Freak
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2015-05-10, 10:39
(This post was last modified: 2015-05-10, 12:13 by noggin.)
As others have said, sadly it's Allwinner based, and the Allwinner VPUs (Cedar?) have terrible open source driver support, so although there are some Kodi builds knocking around, they are far from great.
The $9 version only gives you composite SD analogue video output, you have to pay $24 for the Chip with HDMI output. At that point you are better off buying a Raspberry Pi 2 for Kodi.
Yes - the Chip has 4GB of built in flash, built in WiFi and Bluetooth, but the Pi 2 has twice the RAM, Ethernet and 4 USB ports, and is Quad Core. (The Allwinner A13 that the R8 SoC is a cheaper version of is a single core Cortex A8?).
And the Pi 2 is probably the best supported ARM device there is running Kodi. You can't underestimate that.
The Chip could make a brilliant little distributed music player platform though, and there are lots of other applications where it could give things like the Beaglebone Black a run for its money. It could also be a killer Asterisk platform for that price point.
(Though once you add the $20 international postage - the Pi 2 does really begin to look like a better buy in some ways for many of us)