[trogggy]

There are several reports of the OpenElec and LibreElec buids on the 1Gb RAM , S905 Andorid china boxes freezing and locking up when heavy skins are applied and lots of plugins sre used. There is an issue with everytime a video stream is played RAM usage increases, and after the video stream is finished the RAM is not realeased. Hence after playing several streams RAM is fully utilised and the devices freeze and lockup.

This issue has manifested itself more noticably on the 1Gb RAM devices, but thats not to say 1GB RAM isn't sufficent for Kodi, it seems to suggest theres possible a kernel or build issue thats causing the RAM to not be freed up after playing streams.

1Gb RAM / 8Gb Flash is still crap for android regradless of what , mitigations fanbois are throwing around here the real reason is manufacturers wanted to keep costs down and profit margins up. Why havent the new 2016 devices all got 1Gb RAM and 8gb Flash if it's sufficient for Kodi ? Because theres been a realisation that manufacturers cant get away with cost cutting so easily anymore, as theres too many alternatives for cheaper that will give people the better capacity in terms of RAM and Flash storage.

There are.
Those reports are real.

Now ask yourself why those reports don't generally happen for pi's, weteks etc.

[melhemk]

I have been reading this thread for a while, and honestly all of the experts that I respect and love their posts everywhere are sadly starting to fall into contradictions, and giving gsmtech and others bullets to argue with.
I love WeTek products, and I agree 100% with the pricing in terms of support and firmware, but 2GB tradeoff for a slightly smaller size is just a bad engineering decision. People here are vouching that 1GB (and less) is enough for ELEC, yet discussing the costs of licenses which are for Android, and Android sure as hell could use more RAM, if not for KODI then for other Apps that WeTek is promoting as selling points for this product, that also need more storage..... see, it is a loop, and that is why I am saying that it is a bad engineering decision.

However that doesn't make it "overpriced" or "crap" products, there are no perfect products.

@gsmtech: you are saying a crappy Chinese box is 40$ - 50$ and you would throw it away after a year and get another one since it is not expensive, I think it is better to buy a 100$ WeTek hub that will serve for at least 2 to 3 years.

But seriously, let him enjoy his crappy Chinese products while we enjoy solid ones.

PS: Just wondering how much extra footprint the other RAM chip would need, I do not have a HUB, but can anyone send me the IC number of the RAM and Storage chips please?

[gsmtech]

I have been reading this thread for a while, and honestly all of the experts that I respect and love their posts everywhere are sadly starting to fall into contradictions, and giving gsmtech and others bullets to argue with.
I love WeTek products, and I agree 100% with the pricing in terms of support and firmware, but 2GB tradeoff for a slightly smaller size is just a bad engineering decision. People here are vouching that 1GB (and less) is enough for ELEC, yet discussing the costs of licenses which are for Android, and Android sure as hell could use more RAM, if not for KODI then for other Apps that WeTek is promoting as selling points for this product, that also need more storage..... see, it is a loop, and that is why I am saying that it is a bad engineering decision.

However that doesn't make it "overpriced" or "crap" products, there are no perfect products.

@gsmtech: you are saying a crappy Chinese box is 40$ - 50$ and you would throw it away after a year and get another one since it is not expensive, I think it is better to buy a 100$ WeTek hub that will serve for at least 2 to 3 years.

But seriously, let him enjoy his crappy Chinese products while we enjoy solid ones.

PS: Just wondering how much extra footprint the other RAM chip would need, I do not have a HUB, but can anyone send me the IC number of the RAM and Storage chips please?

@gsmtech: you are saying a crappy Chinese box is 40$ - 50$ and you would throw it away after a year and get another one since it is not expensive, I think it is better to buy a 100$ WeTek hub that will serve for at least 2 to 3 years.


The current device i have was bang on 40 dollars including shipping, (S905, 2Gb RAM, 16Gb Flash, Dual Band 2.4ghz/5ghz WiFi). I didn't say i would throw it away after a year and buy another one because it was inexpensive. I said that I can easily justify upgrading more often as costs are low, S912 devices are cming to market now for around 50 dollars, I can wait for these to become stable and supported and buy one next year if I wanted to, if not I keep my current S905 device. The choice is my'n, even if I did upgrade after a year my total outlay would be under 100 dollars in total for my 40 dollard for my orignka S905 device, plus 50 dolalrs or less for a new s912 device...= 90 dolllars. This is still less than the outlay of your "branded budget" devices with low RAM and Flash...I Have a Win - Win situation

PS: Just wondering how much extra footprint the other RAM chip would need, I do not have a HUB, but can anyone send me the IC number of the RAM and Storage chips please?

It will be very intresting to see the answer to this question, the size excuse is a cop out for cost saving, nothing more. You are right on the money when you say less RAM and Less Storage is bad engineering design.

The same doesnt apply for PI's they are multi-use boards for a variety of purposes that just happen to be useful for kodi too, they are not custom designed tv boxes.So 1Gb RAM is not a design issue from the PI foundation. But you can see even in this sphere why people are saying buy a Odroid C2 instead...More RAM, Amlogic CPU, similar cost...

[melhemk]

It will be very intresting to see the answer to this question, the size excuse is a cop out for cost saving, nothing more. You are right on the money when you say less RAM and Less Storage is bad engineering design.

You are wrong here, I can tell you that the cost difference in adding another 1GB is almost negligible compared to the box price, and in fact if there is an option for the hub with 2GB RAM that is 10$ more expensive, which is way more than the cost of adding that second 1GB RAM, or sourcing a different RAM IC, I (and pretty sure many others) will get that one, and this is why I am saying a bad engineering design.

TL;DR - It is not cost saving, it actually made them lose more money.

[BORIStheBLADE]

Even if the Hub doubled in size just because of adding one more GB of RAM it still would be a reasonable size.

[wrxtasy]

2. There does seem to be an advantage to 2GB at the moment if you're running an ELEC variant on a cheapo amlogic box. People with 1GB devices are reporting freezes / out of memory problems. That's down to bugs / software not optimised though.

This is very likely fixed as the 2GB C2 running LibreELEC and the RPi has been having issues. See the GPU thread in RPi sub forum. Looks like a Kodi memory leak issue both with Jarvis and Krypton.

Any references to Kodi crashing due to device RAM size are starting to look false.

There are devs and users that actually test a bunch of AML devices as opposed to parroting tech specs.

[trogggy]

2. There does seem to be an advantage to 2GB at the moment if you're running an ELEC variant on a cheapo amlogic box. People with 1GB devices are reporting freezes / out of memory problems. That's down to bugs / software not optimised though.

This is very likely fixed as the C2 running LibreELEC and the RPi has been having issues. See the GPU thread in RPi sub forum. Looks like a Kodi issue both with Jarvis and Krypton.

Ta for the info. Good to know.

[MrMC]

512MBs is what I would call the min, FireTV sticks have that. FireTV sticks are actually 1GB but split, half for GPU, half for system/app ram. 1GB is norm, 2GB of course is better. And you do have to factor in how much of that is split for GPU.

But mem leaks will always cause problems. Every few months, I bring out the big guns and go mem leak hunting with a big stick. MrMC fork of course. The things I find are amusing...

At one time, the min was 256 but that was a long time ago before the code base started to bloat

[Ned Scott]

I have been reading this thread for a while, and honestly all of the experts that I respect and love their posts everywhere are sadly starting to fall into contradictions, and giving gsmtech and others bullets to argue with.
I love WeTek products, and I agree 100% with the pricing in terms of support and firmware, but 2GB tradeoff for a slightly smaller size is just a bad engineering decision. People here are vouching that 1GB (and less) is enough for ELEC, yet discussing the costs of licenses which are for Android, and Android sure as hell could use more RAM, if not for KODI then for other Apps that WeTek is promoting as selling points for this product, that also need more storage..... see, it is a loop, and that is why I am saying that it is a bad engineering decision.

However that doesn't make it "overpriced" or "crap" products, there are no perfect products.

@gsmtech: you are saying a crappy Chinese box is 40$ - 50$ and you would throw it away after a year and get another one since it is not expensive, I think it is better to buy a 100$ WeTek hub that will serve for at least 2 to 3 years.

But seriously, let him enjoy his crappy Chinese products while we enjoy solid ones.

PS: Just wondering how much extra footprint the other RAM chip would need, I do not have a HUB, but can anyone send me the IC number of the RAM and Storage chips please?

I get what you're saying and mostly agree.

The Hub is a single product in what will become (eventually, with the Play2S) a four product lineup. It comes down to "do we think we have enough customers that will be happy with this to justify it being a product", and the answer is yes. There are people who need more RAM, and that's what the other three models have.

I still don't think 1GB of RAM is bad or a mistake. It's not just for LibreELEC/OpenELEC. I do 90% of my testing using Android. Before working at WeTek my main device was a Nexus Player, which also only has 1GB of RAM. I have never had any issue with it, and it's still one of the best Android boxes out there. The Core (2GB) almost never used more than a gig, and when it did it was because of games or me trying to run a minecraft server on it at the same time (again, on Android, and it ran fairly well).

I even increase the thumbnail resolution on the Hub and don't see any memory problems in Kodi. I'm actually making fake video libraries to try and break it by sheer library size, for testing purposes. It's harder than I thought it would be.

There is a difference between bugs or people breaking their own settings (the cache size modification users are typically the issue) vs there being a real issue.

[crashnburn]

2. There does seem to be an advantage to 2GB at the moment if you're running an ELEC variant on a cheapo amlogic box. People with 1GB devices are reporting freezes / out of memory problems. That's down to bugs / software not optimised though.

This is very likely fixed as the 2GB C2 running LibreELEC and the RPi has been having issues. See the GPU thread in RPi sub forum. Looks like a Kodi memory leak issue both with Jarvis and Krypton.

Any references to Kodi crashing due to device RAM size are starting to look false.

There are devs and users that actually test a bunch of AML devices as opposed to parroting tech specs.

Interesting statement So the Amlogic 1G RAM boxes are gonna be fine or does one have to go to 2G?

[gsmtech]

I have been reading this thread for a while, and honestly all of the experts that I respect and love their posts everywhere are sadly starting to fall into contradictions, and giving gsmtech and others bullets to argue with.
I love WeTek products, and I agree 100% with the pricing in terms of support and firmware, but 2GB tradeoff for a slightly smaller size is just a bad engineering decision. People here are vouching that 1GB (and less) is enough for ELEC, yet discussing the costs of licenses which are for Android, and Android sure as hell could use more RAM, if not for KODI then for other Apps that WeTek is promoting as selling points for this product, that also need more storage..... see, it is a loop, and that is why I am saying that it is a bad engineering decision.

However that doesn't make it "overpriced" or "crap" products, there are no perfect products.

@gsmtech: you are saying a crappy Chinese box is 40$ - 50$ and you would throw it away after a year and get another one since it is not expensive, I think it is better to buy a 100$ WeTek hub that will serve for at least 2 to 3 years.

But seriously, let him enjoy his crappy Chinese products while we enjoy solid ones.

PS: Just wondering how much extra footprint the other RAM chip would need, I do not have a HUB, but can anyone send me the IC number of the RAM and Storage chips please?

I get what you're saying and mostly agree.

The Hub is a single product in what will become (eventually, with the Play2S) a four product lineup. It comes down to "do we think we have enough customers that will be happy with this to justify it being a product", and the answer is yes. There are people who need more RAM, and that's what the other three models have.

I still don't think 1GB of RAM is bad or a mistake. It's not just for LibreELEC/OpenELEC. I do 90% of my testing using Android. Before working at WeTek my main device was a Nexus Player, which also only has 1GB of RAM. I have never had any issue with it, and it's still one of the best Android boxes out there. The Core (2GB) almost never used more than a gig, and when it did it was because of games or me trying to run a minecraft server on it at the same time (again, on Android, and it ran fairly well).

I even increase the thumbnail resolution on the Hub and don't see any memory problems in Kodi. I'm actually making fake video libraries to try and break it by sheer library size, for testing purposes. It's harder than I thought it would be.

There is a difference between bugs or people breaking their own settings (the cache size modification users are typically the issue) vs there being a real issue.

So the previous spiel about the Hub having a compact footprint so only 1GB RAM would fit the board vs 2GB was all BS ?? Hence why the footprint size differences between the 1Gb chip vs the 2Gb chip asked for by the previous poster....havent been provided///

The new explanation makes more sense, theres a product line up, the Hub is the budget offering, they are saying if you want 2Gb RAM you have to buy the non-budget product and pay more cash...

[JonSnow88]

its a shame the play2 has 8gb, in 2016 8gb just makes no sense for any device and since it isn't a budget device i don't know what to say. To say it is enough for Kodi is also an excuse 4.7GB usable space isn't much IMO, one of my boxes is already about 3GB as was the case with my Pi2 setup. It really makes zero sense for a Android box, I would rather pay extra to get 16GB than resort to using an SD card.

[Draghmar]

But that's the point - if 8GB is not enough for your needs then you can expand it by SD card. You would pay more and I wouldn't because I don't need extra 8GB. So like you see different customer, different needs. And it's easier to make device that can be upgraded then downgraded.

[JonSnow88]

yes thats true, and thats why you buy the hub instead.No reason why the play2 couldn't have 16gb.

[KoopaTroopa]

I don't understand the Wetek Hub "bashing" going on in this thread.

NONE of the budget S905 boxes with LE/OE can deliver 1080p Netflix in addition to Kodi in the same box.

If you have a S905 box with LE, and you want to watch 1080p Netflix then you gotta buy another box. (or hope you have a TV that has Netflix built-in)

There's no reason to bash on the Wetek Hub for delivering things that the budget S905 boxes do not deliver.

They are not equivalent. They might share some (or most) of the same specs, but they are not equivalent.

The fact is, the S905 budget boxes do not deliver 1080p Netflix. The Wetek Hub does. So, if people out there need a single box for those 2 criteria then all of those equivalent specs in the budget boxes still make them irrelevant. So please stop focusing on tech specs alone, even if there is some truth to the opinions, there is also a lot of BS included.