[movie78]

Finally the Intel Kaby Lake NUCs are official!

I am keeping the AsRock Kaby Lake because of the dual HDMI, I am tired of buying and returning

[fab67]

The new NUC have 7567U and 7260U CPU with Intel® Iris™ Plus Graphics 640.

Is Graphics 640 better than Graphics 620 for multimedia ( KODI ) use ?

[_Spook_]

For just Kodi use Apollo Lake or the i3 NUC is more then enough.

@movie78 have you had problems with the Skylake NUCs?

I will keep my Skylake NUC as main platform. Kaby Lake is bound to have some problems with the LPSCON chip in there and that has not been implemented in the Intel i915 drm drivers yet (maybe it's in the nightlies now).

[movie78]

For just Kodi use Apollo Lake or the i3 NUC is more then enough.

@movie78 have you had problems with the Skylake NUCs?

I will keep my Skylake NUC as main platform. Kaby Lake is bound to have some problems with the LPSCON chip in there and that has not been implemented in the Intel i915 DRM drivers yet (maybe it's in the nightlies now).

No, I have the AsRock Kaby Lake.

[_Spook_]

For just Kodi use Apollo Lake or the i3 NUC is more then enough.

@movie78 have you had problems with the Skylake NUCs?

I will keep my Skylake NUC as main platform. Kaby Lake is bound to have some problems with the LPSCON chip in there and that has not been implemented in the Intel i915 DRM drivers yet (maybe it's in the nightlies now).

No, I have the AsRock Kaby Lake.

Ok. Just wondered since you said you where tired of returns What have returned that you weren't happy with?

[movie78]

For just Kodi use Apollo Lake or the i3 NUC is more then enough.

@movie78 have you had problems with the Skylake NUCs?

I will keep my Skylake NUC as main platform. Kaby Lake is bound to have some problems with the LPSCON chip in there and that has not been implemented in the Intel i915 DRM drivers yet (maybe it's in the nightlies now).

No, I have the AsRock Kaby Lake.

Ok. Just wondered since you said you where tired of returns What have returned that you weren't happy with?

Intel Hardware devices that I have returned and some are just personal reason.

Don't like

Dell 3050 very slow and simple 1080p file were very choppy
Intel NUC i3 Skylake if I can remember the 3D picture did look great and also I couldn't get the lipsync to work with my settings(subjective)
MSI Kaby Lake I don't know if it was driver issue but every time I start playing 4K files in Kodi when I hit stop the size of Kodi just shrink to the left corner of the screen, Maintaining the resolution was changing after reboot or 4k playback and I was unable to get 3D MVC to work, maybe because it only had 1 HDMI port with 2.0 specs.

Like

Intel i3 4010 NUC
Intel DN2820/2830
And the AsRock Kaby Lake

[stinuz]

Hello Movie78,

After years of using an old HP desktop computer with kodi, behind a false wall here in my living room, I finally decided to buy the Beebox-S 7200 with the kaby lake processor. I putted in a M.2 SSD and 2 Memory modules DDR4 - 8GB Ram. I know it's overkill but it's an i5 and I thought if I use this box in the future for something else it would be better. Both the SSD and DDR4 are from the same brand, crucial. And I putted in 2 DDR4 modules because I read somewhere on the internet that this is mandatory for 4K...

Excited as I was I booted the appliance, installed ubunte, because I didn't wanted to buy a windows license, installed kodi and played back some movies / tv shows. I noticed directly that it didn't played smooth and I was a bit disappointed. With my old HTPC I just thought it was because of older hardware but with the brand new box I knew this was not possible. Both my old HTPC and the beebox are directly capable of doing hardware decoding and I did not understand why I had stuttering. With the new Beebox I started investigating and I quickly came to the following kodi thread. http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1943753 (after installing, windows, then again ubuntu and finally I'm back on windows for various other reasons...) Netflix 4K, Logitech Harmony support ....

Long story, short: I needed to enable both settings (refresh rate to tv: to get rid of the stuttering and sync playback to device: to avoid lipsync issues when I enable the first setting).

I need to test some more 4K movies because It's possible that I only face this issue with FullHD content.(720p, 1080p..) I understand that a lot depends on the type of movie and the encoded settings I try to play with kodi. At least I already loaded some 4K samples and with both settings off I don't get stuttering. I think it's due to the fact that the refresh rate from my 4K movies are already @60hz.

What I really want to ask is if you (or somebody else here) knows if there is quality loss when using both kodi settings. It seems like most of my 1080P content plays at 24hz now instead of 60hz and I think I will have a lower quality. But I can't see the difference visually with my eyes so far. I guess the lower the refresh rate the lower the quality for faster movie scenes (images at a fast pace, moving around...) And also I would like to know what your settings are. If you would like to share.

At this moment, I'm happy with both settings turned on. And I guess when I use the correct 4K movies encoded at 60hz I will be good to go.

I'm using
ASRock Beebox-S 7200 kaby lake
Onkyo TX-NR646 receiver
5.1 surround with Klipsch satellite quintet speakers and BK Electronics Gemini 2 subwoofer
Windows 10 Pro
Kodi Krypton

Best regards,
Stijn

[movie78]

Hello Movie78,

After years of using an old HP desktop computer with kodi, behind a false wall here in my living room, I finally decided to buy the Beebox-S 7200 with the kaby lake processor. I putted in a M.2 SSD and 2 Memory modules DDR4 - 8GB Ram. I know it's overkill but it's an i5 and I thought if I use this box in the future for something else it would be better. Both the SSD and DDR4 are from the same brand, crucial. And I putted in 2 DDR4 modules because I read somewhere on the internet that this is mandatory for 4K...

Excited as I was I booted the appliance, installed ubunte, because I didn't wanted to buy a windows license, installed kodi and played back some movies / tv shows. I noticed directly that it didn't played smooth and I was a bit disappointed. With my old HTPC I just thought it was because of older hardware but with the brand new box I knew this was not possible. Both my old HTPC and the beebox are directly capable of doing hardware decoding and I did not understand why I had stuttering. With the new Beebox I started investigating and I quickly came to the following kodi thread. http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1943753 (after installing, windows, then again ubuntu and finally I'm back on windows for various other reasons...) Netflix 4K, Logitech Harmony support ....

Long story, short: I needed to enable both settings (refresh rate to tv: to get rid of the stuttering and sync playback to device: to avoid lipsync issues when I enable the first setting).

I need to test some more 4K movies because It's possible that I only face this issue with FullHD content.(720p, 1080p..) I understand that a lot depends on the type of movie and the encoded settings I try to play with kodi. At least I already loaded some 4K samples and with both settings off I don't get stuttering. I think it's due to the fact that the refresh rate from my 4K movies are already @60hz.

What I really want to ask is if you (or somebody else here) knows if there is quality loss when using both kodi settings. It seems like most of my 1080P content plays at 24hz now instead of 60hz and I think I will have a lower quality. But I can't see the difference visually with my eyes so far. I guess the lower the refresh rate the lower the quality for faster movie scenes (images at a fast pace, moving around...) And also I would like to know what your settings are. If you would like to share.

At this moment, I'm happy with both settings turned on. And I guess when I use the correct 4K movies encoded at 60hz I will be good to go.

I'm using
ASRock Beebox-S 7200 kaby lake
Onkyo TX-NR646 receiver
5.1 surround with Klipsch satellite quintet speakers and BK Electronics Gemini 2 subwoofer
Windows 10 Pro
Kodi Krypton

Best regards,
Stijn

Welcome to the awesome journey of Kodi, below are the settings that i am using for Windows.




These settings allow the display to switch to proper resolution and framerate



Do not use Ubuntu with your hardware, try reading the Apollo Lake thread the have more recent release that is fully compactible with Kaby Lake.

Apollo Lake Thread

[stinuz]

Thanks for posting your current configuration. I did notice that I'm missing some options:
- I can't set the fixed refresh rate to 60hz in the display settings
- Decode the stereo stream from 3D files is also missing.

I'm using RC2 (12/30/2016) and you are on RC1 and that is probably the reason. For smooth playback we came to the same settings and we both turned on the sync playback to display and adjust display to refresh rate. Thats the only combination that works for me. Further I needed to finetune some intel display settings with regards to staircase patterns in some movies. I needed to turn off contrast enhancement. Luckily somebody on this forum already solved this issue and this saved me probably a lot of time.

Another thing I turned on is stereo upmixing. My music collection is also imported in the kodi library and it's nice to hear the music coming from all my speakers.

If I understand the apollo thread a bit, because it seems it's a supertechnical thread, I assume that you mean libreElec instead of Ubuntu? I tried installing openElec before, but it fails big time on the Beebox-S 7200 kaby lake. I tried almost everything but couldn't get it running. After several attempts I was finally stuck in the fact that the OS could not load StartX and after a couple of hours I gave up and used Ubuntu. Maybe LibreElec will work better but I'm happy with windows right now.

Another user in the thread mentions that windows is way worse than linux because of the fact that windows runs a lot of background tasks consuming overhead / power / ... I don't think this is relevant for the Beebox-S 7200... those systems are really horsepowers. Ok they will consume more energy but the system is here in sleep mode when I'm not using it.

Two other things in the thread I don't understand are frame packing and windows MVC (I think MVC is something specific for 3D...) , so far I don't watch 3D movies and I probably will never do this at home.

And to continue my journey I will need to make a choice between AEON NOX or the new default Estuary skin. I did like the thing that AEON could create custom top level menu items and I did not found this yet for Estuary. I do like all other things in Estuary, so far.. Especially the movies in progress or recently added summary view.. What are you using?

Br,
Stijn

[_Spook_]

Just ordered one of each of the new NUC7 (i3, i5 and i7). Let's see which one gets here first

[movie78]

Just ordered one of each of the new NUC7 (i3, i5 and i7). Let's see which one gets here first

One of each

Why?

[hdmkv]

Seems the consensus, at least for now, is to get an Apollo Lake or Kaby Lake w/both a HDMI 1.4 port and a 2.0 port right, to have both 3D MVC and 4K @60 and 10-bit?

[movie78]

Seems the consensus, at least for now, is to get an Apollo Lake or Kaby Lake w/both a HDMI 1.4 port and a 2.0 port right, to have both 3D MVC and 4K @60 and 10-bit?

Yes, until Kodi Dev or Intel Dev resolved the HDMI 2.0 issues, the only MINI PC (NUC Like) that has both HDMI 1.4 and 2.0 is the AsRock Beebox.

[baba420]

But what about HDMI 2.0a necessity? Will Intel upgrade the 2.0 port to 2.0a with a firmware update?
The new announced Nvidia Shield has even HDMI 2.0b. Very confusing and yet almost zero content...

[movie78]

But what about HDMI 2.0a necessity? Will Intel upgrade the 2.0 port to 2.0a with a firmware update?
The new announced Nvidia Shield has even HDMI 2.0b. Very confusing and yet almost zero content...

There is also HDMI 2.1, this craziness will never stop.