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+--- Thread: Hardware that just works? (/showthread.php?tid=239749)
RE: Hardware that just works? - famulor - 2015-09-27
The unit will be dedicated to play videos and trailers (i dont know if kodi has a trailer function or if it needs to be done via youtube? its not a must have but a nice to have). The Pi2 never really "spoke" to me (maybe thats a mistake on my end?). I need flirc and wi-fi support.
Regarding the chromebox. It dosen't look like the M004U is for sale in my country. only the M118U is. is there any difference between the two?
Is the beebox hard to setup or high maintance?
RE: Hardware that just works? - afremont - 2015-09-27
Would this work for you?
http://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:HD-Trailers.net
To be honest, I bought my first RPi just to tinker with it. I didn't set out to get it for home theater purposes. I already had a windows media center machine that did most of what I wanted, but it was tying up my moderately powerful I7 doing little to nothing outside of using it to watch Live TV and make DVR type recordings of TV shows. My blu-ray player was doing the rest of the work.
I had used MythTV about 12 or 13 years ago so I knew what it was, but hadn't kept up with its development. I'd heard of xbmc, but not having an xbox (not a big gamer here) I hadn't seen it. My first Pi came with xbmc pre-loaded on the noobs flash card, so I decided to investigate it. I installed the WMC PVR addon and was pleased to find that I could now use my I7 again without disrupting my wife's TV time. Later on, I purchased a Pi2 when they were available and was quite impressed with the performance improvement over the old Pi B+. Meanwhile, I also found OpenELEC and then decided to permanently use the Pi 2 to drive my projector and sound system in the living room.
The windows machine was using a Hauppauge 950Q USB based tuner, but that was getting frustrating as it was unavailable for live TV when the WMC box was using it for recording. So I started looking for a solution to that. I bought a stand-alone Mediasonic Homeworx ATSC tuner, but I hated it so now it sits unused and unconnected. It was slow to tune, WMC couldn't use it and it had frustrating software problems. Then I discovered the HDHomerun from Silicondust. Ah, problem solved since WMC could use it and it had dual tuners. After filling the 1TB HD on the WMC box, I needed to do something.
I decided to build a lowish end machine and dedicate it to DVR service full time. I bought a cheap Gigabyte H97 board, an I3, 8GB RAM (more overkill) and a 5TB HD. I installed Mythbuntu on an old 60GB SSD I had sitting around and used the 5TB drive for media storage. I installed the MythTV PVR addon in the OpenELEC Pi and easily migrated the wife since she couldn't tell the difference. The hard part was earlier on when we switched from WMC to OpenELEC (kodi). She was resistant until she found out about the hundreds of Kodi addons that would keep her swimming in old movies, conspiracy and alien shows etc. I acquired another HDHomerun and the MythTV back-end easily connected to both of them. We had an Amazon Fire TV Stick from the time they became available, so I installed Kodi on it too since I love to hack things. I'd have a Chromebox too for hacking, but I can't justify the expense for doing only that.
I've been keeping my eye on the Intel NUC boxes for a couple of years, and when the Braswell box came out I decided I just "had to have one" as it seemed the perfect device to build an all-in-one media center (MythTV backend and Kodi front-end, along with Chrome to play Netflix and possibly Amazon streams) that I can show to potential cable cutter customers. It's small, reasonably powerful, sexy looking and capable of doing the job. That's really the only reason I have one. I looked at mini-itx solutions, but they were larger than what I wanted. The NUC is the size of an Apple TV box, yet contains everything to host a complete media center. With a 1TB internal HD, I can preload the music, pictures and video categories with samples and even have room left over for some pre-made TV recordings. IOW, it's perfect for what I want to do with it.
That all said, I'm not trying to coerce you into buying anything in particular. I just want to be sure that you are informed on the alternatives and that, hopefully, I've helped you understand how to make your own choice. After all, it's ultimately you that has to live with it, not me or anyone else on the forum. I just don't want you to think that you need a bunch of horsepower if something like a Raspberry Pi would meet your needs for less than $100. I don't have a bunch of money to spend and none to waste needlessly; so I try to learn as much as possible before making a purchase. My needs would have been met with a NUC5CPYH (Celeron), but I just couldn't resist getting a faster, better (16 GPU execution units vs. 12 on the Celeron and 4 cores instead of 2) box for only $40 more.
I apologize for being so long winded, but I wanted to state my reasons for making my suggestion. They are formed from actual experience with the Pi and with the NUC. I know nothing about the Beebox or the Chromebox from personal experience. I only "know" what I've read about them. I haven't read anything compelling enough to sway me away from the NUC towards one of those though. I'm not saying they're junk or bad choices, just that I didn't think they offered the most advanced hardware or more bang for the buck. The 2955U CPU has some decent features, I just decided that the Braswell was more in line with my personal desires.
Of course, Intel is going to come out with something better before too much longer, and I'll likely wish that I had waited. OTOH, I have something now that I can enjoy tinkering with. I like tough problems and, to me, the Braswell has brought me a lot of self-satisfaction because I enjoyed solving my driver/software problems that came with bleeding edge hardware choices.
RE: Hardware that just works? - famulor - 2015-09-28
To be honest i just want something that (once setup is done) works and plays whatever i throw at it. (i dont have any 4K movies) whether it may be a beebox, chromebox or raspberri pi2 i really dont care as long as its semi easy to setup
are all of them able to run all the skins on kodi without problems? (not that its a must but a nice thing to know) and it needs to be able to connect to WiFi.Edit: After reading about a bit of everything the chromebox seems like its quite easy to setup and runs like a charm. Is this correct? i guess i need to purchase a FLIRC usb dongle for it?
Edit number 2: Btw is there any problems with connecting to 5.1 surroundsound on any of the 3 boxes?
RE: Hardware that just works? - noggin - 2015-09-28
(2015-09-28, 14:06)famulor Wrote: Edit: After reading about a bit of everything the chromebox seems like its quite easy to setup and runs like a charm. Is this correct?Yes. The BIOS is quite picky about what keyboards it supports - as it properly enforces a USB standard that many keyboards are a bit lax about - to speed up booting. Some people have reported issues with some USB sticks. I've had no problems with regular Sandisk and Lexar USB drives and none of my USB cabled keyboards have caused issues.
Quote:i guess i need to purchase a FLIRC usb dongle for it?Some people use FLIRC, some buy RC6 Windows MCE remotes and USB IR receivers. As the Chromebox has built in Bluetooth, the PS3 Blu-ray remote is a good fit, and means you don't have to lose a USB slot, and can hide the Chomrebox away as you don't need line-of-sight.
Quote:Edit number 2: Btw is there any problems with connecting to 5.1 surroundsound on any of the 3 boxes?
No problems with surround - DD/DTS/Dolby True HD/DTS HD MA/HRA/Multichannel PCM audio to an AVR over HDMI.
However if your surround system is an older one which only accepts TOSLINK or SPDIF Coax you will need either an external USB sound device with driver support for your preferred Kodi platform (OpenElec usually on the Chromebox ) OR an HDMI audio extractor.
RE: Hardware that just works? - famulor - 2015-09-28
(2015-09-28, 15:13)noggin Wrote: [quote='famulor' pid='2117910' dateline='1443441961']Yes. The BIOS is quite picky about what keyboards it supports - as it properly enforces a USB standard that many keyboards are a bit lax about - to speed up booting. Some people have reported issues with some USB sticks. I've had no problems with regular Sandisk and Lexar USB drives and none of my USB cabled keyboards have caused issues.
Edit: After reading about a bit of everything the chromebox seems like its quite easy to setup and runs like a charm. Is this correct?
[quote]
My plan was to hook it up to my primary PC while setting the thing up and then plug it into the TV (philips 4K tv) and only use the remote from there on without a keyboard. Is that going to be a problem? The chromebox i have in mind is the "ASUS CHROMEBOX-M118U, 1,4 GHz, Intel Celeron, 2955U, 2 GB, DDR3-SDRAM, 4 GB max ram". I guess thats more than good enough for my needs?
RE: Hardware that just works? - afremont - 2015-09-28
In my experience, the Raspberry Pi was the easiest to set up. Once you put the board in a case and plug in your peripherals, you just install OE to a flash card using something like Win32DiskImager and boot the Pi from it. After that you go through a few setup steps to set your sound format, connect to the network, set your timezone etc. Using OE or Kodi on any of the boxes is going to be pretty much the same experience in terms of setting it up. The biggest problem some people face is getting no video from the Pi. It's almost always a result of HDMI cable incompatibility. You also have to make sure you use a 2A power supply. The Ortkek control I linked to "just works" once OE boots up, no configuration necessary.
I haven't played with/hacked a Chromebox, so I can't tell you how easy or hard it is to get working. Unless you buy something with built in IR (such as the NUC like I have), you'll have to buy some kind of IR receiver for it or rely on CEC from your TV to control it.
I have had no problems getting 7.1 surround working with the Pi using OpenELEC. The NUC was a little more complicated, especially to get passthrough working, but that is because it's new hardware and I was using a Linux distro underneath Kodi. OpenELEC was easy on the NUC once I found the right build to install, until then I couldn't get VAAPI acceleration to work. I can't remember if I needed the out of cycle custom build to get 7.1 working.
I only use the Confluence skin so I can't speak for the others. The only difference I can see between using the NUC and the Pi is that the Pi is a little slower bringing up the TV Guide screen, but then I have over 100 channels for it to parse through. The NUC loads the recordings, channels and guide info a little faster at start up using the MythTV PVR client. Outside of that, I don't see any real difference. Once video is playing, they are indistinguishable.
RE: Hardware that just works? - noggin - 2015-09-28
(2015-09-28, 15:21)famulor Wrote:(2015-09-28, 15:13)noggin Wrote:My plan was to hook it up to my primary PC while setting the thing up and then plug it into the TV (philips 4K tv) and only use the remote from there on without a keyboard. Is that going to be a problem? The chromebox i have in mind is the "ASUS CHROMEBOX-M118U, 1,4 GHz, Intel Celeron, 2955U, 2 GB, DDR3-SDRAM, 4 GB max ram". I guess thats more than good enough for my needs?(2015-09-28, 14:06)famulor Wrote: Edit: After reading about a bit of everything the chromebox seems like its quite easy to setup and runs like a charm. Is this correct?Yes. The BIOS is quite picky about what keyboards it supports - as it properly enforces a USB standard that many keyboards are a bit lax about - to speed up booting. Some people have reported issues with some USB sticks. I've had no problems with regular Sandisk and Lexar USB drives and none of my USB cabled keyboards have caused issues.
That Chromebox is fine for regular Kodi, as long as you don't want (high bitrate?) HEVC stuff. You may be surprised that 4K H264 stuff works quite well too :-)
Not sure what you would do by hooking it up to your PC? Or do you mean hooking it up instead of your PC - so using the PC's keyboard and monitor for the installation process. There is a bit of unscrewing required to disable the write protect - but that is very well documented by Matt Devo in the excellent wiki. http://kodi.wiki/view/ASUS_Chromebox
RE: Hardware that just works? - noggin - 2015-09-28
(2015-09-28, 15:22)afremont Wrote: I haven't played with/hacked a Chromebox, so I can't tell you how easy or hard it is to get working. Unless you buy something with built in IR (such as the NUC like I have), you'll have to buy some kind of IR receiver for it or rely on CEC from your TV to control it.Or use a Bluetooth remote with the built in Bluetooth. Quite a few of us use the PS3 Blu-ray remote with our Chromeboxes. It's a nice remote which doesn't need any extra receivers to work as the Chromebox has Bluetooth built in.
Quote:I have had no problems getting 7.1 surround working with the Pi using OpenELEC. The NUC was a little more complicated, especially to get passthrough working, but that is because it's new hardware and I was using a Linux distro underneath Kodi. OpenELEC was easy on the NUC once I found the right build to install, until then I couldn't get VAAPI acceleration to work. I can't remember if I needed the out of cycle custom build to get 7.1 working.
Yep - Intel audio was a paint for a while in some flavours of Linux. As was VAAPI acceleration - and particularly VAAPI deinterlacing. The OpenElec release is now pretty good for most people - though the EGL cutting edge stuff in the Linux forum is even better :-)
Quote:I only use the Confluence skin so I can't speak for the others. The only difference I can see between using the NUC and the Pi is that the Pi is a little slower bringing up the TV Guide screen, but then I have over 100 channels for it to parse through. The NUC loads the recordings, channels and guide info a little faster at start up using the MythTV PVR client. Outside of that, I don't see any real difference. Once video is playing, they are indistinguishable.
I'm Confluence as well. The Pi 2 is a bit less fluid - as if the GUI is being rendered more slowly - and you get an occasional pause for longer than you do on a Chromebox. However the Pi 2 is excellent for the price - and as you say, the picture quality is excellent when replaying.
RE: Hardware that just works? - afremont - 2015-09-28
The only bluetooth remote I have is for an Amazon Fire TV Stick, so I have never any real need or opportunity to go that route with Kodi control. I do use my phone sometimes to control it, just for fun though. Most of the time I use the Ortek remote as it does a good job and has lots of range. I also have one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KF9LHUI?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00
It's not the most intuitive thing, but it's great when you need a keyboard and it doesn't interfere with the Ortek. I use it on my other Pi2 running OpenELEC. Now they have a backlit version that is bluetooth, so people might be interested in that, or not.
The Pi is what it is. It's not a powerhouse, but it's absolutely silent and the smallest thing out there that runs Kodi, excepting the little Android sticks like the one from Amazon. Speaking of those, I'd push the Amazon Fire TV Stick harder, but the deinterlacing needs a little work. Or maybe I'm just not doing something right with it. I'm sure it will improve as the release come along. I think it's already gotten a bit better. It also needs some help through an advancedsettimgs.xml change to prevent stuttering and buffering pauses too at least when using the MythTV PVR client. Outside of that, it's a really good deal at $40 including a remote. The really nice thing about it is that it plays Netflix and Amazon Prime videos without issue and without a lot of hoop jumping. It also needs a mechanism to put the Kodi application on the main menu instead of having to do the settings/application settings/manage installed applications rigamaroll.
Back to the Pi, it does lack a little of the smoothness that other platforms bring to the table, but then they do it because they have underlying hardware that is much more powerful. OpenELEC for the Pi was an amazing accomplishment. It reminds me of an old Via mini-itx Myth Frontend that I had over 10 years ago. Once you got everything just so, hardware acceleration would work and you could watch live TV, recordings and ripped DVDs as smooth as glass. It took a ton of work to get that going though. Oddly, you can still see pictures of that platform on the internet:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813181018
That was amazing technology about 10 years ago and had just enough power to pull it off. I still have mine, and I'm sure it still boots just fine. It's been collecting dust for quite a few years now. The NUC is a monster compared to that thing. The Raspberry Pi is probably just as powerful as that epia board was, if not more so.
As you can see, I've been around the block a couple times in my life. To really show my age, here is my first computer as a kid:
http://www.oldcomputers.net/netronics-elf.html
I still have it and it still works. Mine came from Netronics, but the board was green and not brown. Back then 4K of 8-bit SRAM would cost you close to $100 and you had a pile of soldering to do. Things have come a very long way since then.
RE: Hardware that just works? - noggin - 2015-09-28
(2015-09-28, 19:50)afremont Wrote: Back to the Pi, it does lack a little of the smoothness that other platforms bring to the table, but then they do it because they have underlying hardware that is much more powerful. OpenELEC for the Pi was an amazing accomplishment. It reminds me of an old Via mini-itx Myth Frontend that I had over 10 years ago.
I assume you're talking about the UI on the Pi / Pi 2 - the core video playback is pretty close to identical to anything else. There are no dropped frames on a well set-up system, and if you have refresh rate switching properly configured it should play all supported codecs as smoothly as any other platform. The 1080i de-interlacing by default is a good Bob, but you can enable MMAL Advanced if you over clock slightly, and that will do a very good job on native interlaced content. Not quite nVidia territory, and I'd say Intel MCDI has an edge too, but still very good, and streets ahead of most other things for the price (apart from the AMLogic stuff which is also very good)
Quote:As you can see, I've been around the block a couple times in my life. To really show my age, here is my first computer as a kid:Ah - I always wanted something like that or Sinclair Mk 14. My first computer was a kit-built ZX81 (aka Timex 1000)
http://www.oldcomputers.net/netronics-elf.html
I still have it and it still works. Mine came from Netronics, but the board was green and not brown. Back then 4K of 8-bit SRAM would cost you close to $100 and you had a pile of soldering to do. Things have come a very long way since then.
RE: Hardware that just works? - afremont - 2015-09-28
I should have been more clear, I was only talking about the GUI, not the video playback. I consider the playback as good as anything else that I've seen, but I'm sure there are other platforms out there that can make marginal subjective improvements over what the Pi hardware can do, but I think most people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. So much of what I watch is 480 SD TV, so it's hard to notice the difference between the various deinterlacers on my setup, but on the Fire TV Stick, I saw a lot of combing (if that's the right term) when things were in motion playing 480 ST TV stuff, but I could force a deinterlacer and it would look fine, so I suspect it's just a platform thing and kodi defaults not cooperating. I use MMAL playback on the Pi, but I let it pick the default deinterlacer.
I've seen it fail to deinterlace on occasion after days of operation, but then I run nightly builds so bugs and quirks are to be expected. A system restart usually fixes things, so I chalk it up to a mild memory leak somewhere. They'll find it. My wife runs a lot of the addons that scrape websites and when they get errors, it usually results in a memory leak. That's likely what leads to the auto deinterlacing not kicking in.
I remember the Timex 1000 and the SInclair. I believe the TRS-80 (my first love that I couldn't afford) was a Z-80 machine. That and 80186 CPUs are things that many folks have never seen in action. Radio Shack used a 186 in something, I think might have been the Model II. The Color Computer used a Motorola 6809 CPU IIIRC. The Commodore 64 (a truly advanced piece of hardware with a carpy OS) used a MOS 6510 (6502 derivative). I did have one of those for a while. There is still a large user group for the ELF for some reason, it's like a cult of somekind. I think they're using FPGA implementations of the whole system. It's funny. It's nice to meet other old people too.
Now, I'm a big microcontroller fan. Did PIC chips in assembler for years and switched to the Arduino for Q&D projects. ARM7TDMI is what I cut my teeth on with an openocd JTAG debugger. That's some cool hardware there when you come up from PICs. The Pi is an incredible device from my perspective. It fits so nicely into so many roles. I have a Raspbian mail server running on a B+. It works great. It replaced a dual CPU PII-450 machine without issue.
To the OP, I apologize for getting so far off topic. I just had to reminisce a little.
I think the Pi will meet your requirements, but if you want to do anything else with the box, then get something with an Intel CPU.
RE: Hardware that just works? - famulor - 2015-09-30
(2015-09-28, 18:51)noggin Wrote:(2015-09-28, 15:21)famulor Wrote:(2015-09-28, 15:13)noggin Wrote: Yes. The BIOS is quite picky about what keyboards it supports - as it properly enforces a USB standard that many keyboards are a bit lax about - to speed up booting. Some people have reported issues with some USB sticks. I've had no problems with regular Sandisk and Lexar USB drives and none of my USB cabled keyboards have caused issues.My plan was to hook it up to my primary PC while setting the thing up and then plug it into the TV (philips 4K tv) and only use the remote from there on without a keyboard. Is that going to be a problem? The chromebox i have in mind is the "ASUS CHROMEBOX-M118U, 1,4 GHz, Intel Celeron, 2955U, 2 GB, DDR3-SDRAM, 4 GB max ram". I guess thats more than good enough for my needs?
That Chromebox is fine for regular Kodi, as long as you don't want (high bitrate?) HEVC stuff. You may be surprised that 4K H264 stuff works quite well too :-)
Not sure what you would do by hooking it up to your PC? Or do you mean hooking it up instead of your PC - so using the PC's keyboard and monitor for the installation process. There is a bit of unscrewing required to disable the write protect - but that is very well documented by Matt Devo in the excellent wiki. http://kodi.wiki/view/ASUS_Chromebox
Isnt it roughly the same as suggested in the thread earlier?
What i meant by hooking it up to my pc was actually hooking it up to my PC monitor (because i have my mouse and keyboard here) to set it up and then plug it into the TV and using a remote there. Would the chromebox be able to recieve "tv remote" input from a smartphone?
RE: Hardware that just works? - Matt Devo - 2015-09-30
(2015-09-30, 21:59)famulor Wrote: Would the chromebox be able to recieve "tv remote" input from a smartphone?
what exactly do you mean by that? Any Kodi instance can be controlled by a smartphone app (Kore, Yatse) as long as the webserver is enabled, the underlying hardware is irrelevant
RE: Hardware that just works? - MrCrispy - 2015-10-01
The only thing lacking in Asus Chromebox is 3d MVC playback and HEVC decode. If your media doesn't have these, then IMO its still a good option, IF you can get it for cheap where you live. Just pair it with a BT remote, no need to mess with IR receivers/FLIRC when BT is so much faster.
Honestly I have no idea why Android doesn't support HD bitstreaming yet, if they did that then there are tons of Android boxes that become viable - they all have remotes, a ton of apps for everything, nice UI's and small form factor with low power usage, 4k/HEVC etc. These are still a good choice if you don't care about HD audio.
RE: Hardware that just works? - famulor - 2015-10-01
(2015-09-30, 22:58)Matt Devo Wrote:To be honest you answered my question perfectly(2015-09-30, 21:59)famulor Wrote: Would the chromebox be able to recieve "tv remote" input from a smartphone?
what exactly do you mean by that? Any Kodi instance can be controlled by a smartphone app (Kore, Yatse) as long as the webserver is enabled, the underlying hardware is irrelevant
sorry for my bad description(2015-10-01, 00:21)MrCrispy Wrote: The only thing lacking in Asus Chromebox is 3d MVC playback and HEVC decode. If your media doesn't have these, then IMO its still a good option, IF you can get it for cheap where you live. Just pair it with a BT remote, no need to mess with IR receivers/FLIRC when BT is so much faster.I dont even know what MVC playback and HEVC is. i have some movies with "h265" and "h264" on them but they are usually 720p/1080p? I dont have any 4K content (and doubt i will in any near future) and the only 3D movies i have are SBS (is that what they are called?) and the chromebox costs abouts $224 where i live
Honestly I have no idea why Android doesn't support HD bitstreaming yet, if they did that then there are tons of Android boxes that become viable - they all have remotes, a ton of apps for everything, nice UI's and small form factor with low power usage, 4k/HEVC etc. These are still a good choice if you don't care about HD audio.