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noggin
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Sorry - the add ons you discuss are not suitable for discussion here...
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noggin
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Definitely beware Android devices if you care about picture quality, sound quality etc. and only need Kodi.
You are usually much better off with devices that run Linux (including OpenElec - which is a cut-down Linux distro) as you get better picture quality (frame rate adjustment, in many cases proper 23.976/59.94 output rather than 24.00 and 60.00 with micro stutter, deinterlacing etc.) and sound quality (in many cases you get HD Audio bitstreamed to your amp)
This is particularly true if you use Kodi to watch your own Blu-ray or DVD content or Live/Recorded TV.
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noggin
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goujam is right - but there are also issues that even if the Android box can output the right frame rates, it doesn't always support automatic switching to the frame rate. If you watch 25Hz content at 60Hz it looks horrible, but it looks great at 50Hz. If you watch 23.976Hz content at 50Hz it judders badly, but it looks great if you can output at 23.976Hz (and better than 50Hz at 59.94Hz). Having to manual change the refresh rate for each different frame rate video you watch gets boring very quickly. Some Android boxes have hacks to allow this to be avoided - but this isn't standardised AIUI (Though Android TV in Android 5.0 Lollipop finally adds support?)
If all you want is to watch streamed video in stereo, and don't care much about picture or sound quality, Android solutions are cheap and quite easy to set-up. If you want decent picture and sound quality - then something like the Pi 2 is a better bet.
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One question I'm still asking myself about this video sync issues, and general uncertainties with good video format support on Android boxes....
Are the problems related with Android, or with the cheap ARM processors used in these boxes?
Is this actually more a limitation of the hardware video processing units in such ARM cpu?
Pierre
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2015-05-17, 07:29
(This post was last modified: 2015-05-17, 09:14 by wrxtasy.)
AMlogic seem to be progressing well in the ARM / Android space with a more open approach to programming interfaces to access the underlying Hardware.
They have some impressive SoC's that have been released recently that have great VPU's that produce really nice deinterlacing and HEVC decoding as well as decoding the more difficult mpeg2 and VC-1 codecs. As an example I am seeing virtually visually perfect 24p sync of HEVC (H265) video when using a AMlogic S805 on Android. This also comes with on the fly refresh rate switching. 24p sync of H264 is still a WIP.