[izprtxqkft]

anyway the short of it is, IF you want dolby vision in general and 4K streaming from services that require DRM - an HTPC is not the option to go for

if you dont care about those things then consider an HTPC as suggested but be sure you don't want it in the future

i predict 8K in the next 18 months so also take that into consideration unless you plan to junk your equipment every 18 months - which is actually easier when using a device that costs less than $200 rather than an HTPC which will (likely) run a lot more than that


my personal preference is disposable devices that do everything currently on the market as well as a couple future-forward features (so i dont get stuck with old stuff)

so my device of choice is the firetv, i had an HTPC and it was out of date in 12 months (it serves as a nas now) - possibly because i was being cheap or i just didnt consider enough options even though it cost $2K because i bought the best available

[selfcontained]

@izprtxqkft did you try a powered HDD? I've read the 3rd-gen Cube's USB port only supplies enough power for an SSD. I've read anecdotally that a wall-powered GPT-initialized/NTFS-formatted HDD is recognized and readable+writable. I know you're a NAS/LAN guy but you might like to try a powered HDD just to tick that box.

[noggin]

anyway the short of it is, IF you want dolby vision in general and 4K streaming from services that require DRM - an HTPC is not the option to go for

if you dont care about those things then consider an HTPC as suggested but be sure you don't want it in the future

i predict 8K in the next 18 months so also take that into consideration unless you plan to junk your equipment every 18 months - which is actually easier when using a device that costs less than $200 rather than an HTPC which will (likely) run a lot more than that


my personal preference is disposable devices that do everything currently on the market as well as a couple future-forward features (so i dont get stuck with old stuff)

so my device of choice is the firetv, i had an HTPC and it was out of date in 12 months (it serves as a nas now) - possibly because i was being cheap or i just didnt consider enough options even though it cost $2K because i bought the best available

As the very wise @fritsch used to say (and probably still does!) - buy the unit that satisfies your requirements today at a low enough budget to replace when tomorrow comes. Futureproofing, today, for a second-guessed tomorrow is usually more expensive than waiting for tomorrow to arrive (and decide what it is!)...

[izprtxqkft]

did you try a powered HDD? I've read the 3rd-gen Cube's USB port only supplies enough power for an SSD. I've read anecdotally that a wall-powered GPT-initialized/NTFS-formatted HDD is recognized and readable+writable. I know you're a NAS/LAN guy but you might like to try a powered HDD just to tick that box.

no i didn't try this but it is possible, the kernel does has ntfs and ntfs3g but i think the actual limitation is a mount manager where nothing will mount these drives
- combined with the realization that the port is only USB2.0 i wouldn't want to pursue getting a usb drive connected directly and mounted any how
 

As the very wise @fritsch used to say (and probably still does!) - buy the unit that satisfies your requirements today at a low enough budget to replace when tomorrow comes. Futureproofing, today, for a second-guessed tomorrow is usually more expensive than waiting for tomorrow to arrive (and decide what it is!)...

yea, the pc i bought was in 2019 for the sole purpose of LibreELEC when i initially gained the ability to backup my 4K UHD discs and i wanted to be able to play them without issue
- it has served in many capacities since then (and still does) without being a media player so not a loss
- since then ive purchased and used half a dozen or more media player devices that serve their intended function for the time they're being used but cheap enough throwing them on the shelf when not useful any longer wasn't an issue

[ashlar]

@AngryBird

from my own movie library on my gen3 cube

dvhe.08.06 - yes
dvhe.07.06 - yes
dvhe.05.09 - yes

this is only to say that Kodi will open the dhve decoder to play these and that they play and look great on my HDR10+ television, i dont have anything to compare to in order to determine if they dont look correct

dts:x passthrough - yes
atmos passthrough - yes
dtshd-hra 5.1 passthrough - yes


if you want to provide samples i would be willing to check them

A couple of questions on this.

1) Is the latest Cube faster than Shield? When I say faster I mean CPU side, so faster for handling complex skins, running scrapers on many files, etc. Any way you could compare performance to an x64 based machine?

2) If it can play all bitstreaming formats, all flavours of Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HDR10+ (not sure about this last one)... what are its limitations? Stuff you wish it did and it doesn't, stuff you wish it would do better. 400Mbps wired with an adapter is not a limitation, in my view of things.

[izprtxqkft]

Is the latest Cube faster than Shield?

hands down yes it is faster "overall", simply the newer processor and less "android" things installed means more resources available to kodi

handling complex skins

i tried embuary on it way back, probably a year ago, it did perform well but had a lot of issues crashing, loosely determined at the time to be due to embuary helper and as that was so long ago on Nexus Alpha i cannot say that it is still that way
since then i chose to not run anything except my own mod of Estuary which made everything very stable but only as long as i accept limitations

running scrapers on many files

i cant say as far as scrapers, i use Jellyfin media server which does all this "for kodi", a new instance of kodi can have it's full library imported in under 5 minutes (~800 movies/2000eps), from fresh install kodi

Any way you could compare performance to an x64 based machine?

i have since ran libreelec and coreelec independently
x86_64 pc is by far faster and i would be more willing to test it's resource limitations with heavy skins, but with the caveat of no dolby vision or widevine which i actively use
coreelec is a lot closer to being on a PC but i can crash it fairly easily, no widevine here either but at least in some instances it has dolby vision

what are its limitations?

as a strictly kodi device it does great
- amazon ads are a f'n pita and they are getting worse about it, limits on how much i can access but compared to shield i would choose it
- no way to change the home launcher

additionally i did buy an nvidia shield pro just to see what the hype is and it was underwhelming to say the least, to the point where i found it unusable
- there is something up with the hdmi-cec that cannot be fully disabled so every time i reset or powered it on it would change my inputs to an invalid input and i ended up breaking the pin out of the hdmi cable to stop it
- the AI upscaling made everything appear "fuzzy" even when disabled so there's a loss of a crisp picture overall
- never got passed the video issues to really test kodi on it
 

400Mbps wired with an adapter is not a limitation, in my view of things.

no not at all, it's been more than responsive, no buffering issues and the like


keep in mind i posted about this back in May (8 months ago now) and my views have changed quite a bit and the device has gotten quite a bit older (14 months ive had it now)
just in the last 2 months i have bought and used 3 devices in order to try and replace the cube gen3 but i still use the gen3 which should say something in itself
currently using a 4th device instead of my cube gen3 for local media consumption but that device is being tested without the use of kodi and without jellyfin, so far it looks like it will replace all 3

and another note on jellyfin, the server side components are solid but the clients are rather weak so in combination with kodi is the only way i could recommend it's use

[Sholander]

what are its limitations?

as a strictly kodi device it does great
- amazon ads are a f'n pita and they are getting worse about it, limits on how much i can access but compared to shield i would choose it
- no way to change the home launcher

Is there a possibility to run your own launcher on top of default to get rid of Amazon crap? 
I own an old FS 4K and am reluctant to upgrade due to such Amazon limitations.

[izprtxqkft]

Is there a possibility to run your own launcher on top of default to get rid of Amazon crap? 

sort-of, yes but not entirely
previously you could use "pm disable-user --user 0" to disable the built in launcher, they've patched that and it will no longer disable
i do have atv-launcher installed but the home button on the remote still takes you to the amazon one, various apps when exiting specifically return you to the "Home" app (instead of just exiting) so you end up there
restarts/resets take you back there

as long as i avoid the home button and those apps i can keep atv-launcher on top but the amazon one is still running in the background

i have even tried "pm set-home-activity" without success

just a whole lot of PITA

and btw the newer versions of FireOS now will show a full screen video ad on start-up unless disabled and still steals focus to the ads over the top of the launcher when disabled so that's just great too

[izprtxqkft]

running scrapers on many files

i decided to see how this performs without using jellyfin media server as the metadata manager and it's pretty bad

completely fresh virgin install of kodi nightly 20240101 (yesterdays build), setup NFS3 so directly accessing, scanned 130 movies
from the log "VideoInfoScanner: Finished scan. Scanning for video info took 395029 ms"

so just over 6.5 minutes for a minimal amount of movies then i had to go manually identify 3 of them because it didn't find them which took several more minutes


-----

for comparison i completely wiped kodi again (removed .kodi) installed jellyfin and it took 1m 42s to import 673 movies (complete with watched states/artwork/metadata)

severe improvement over native

i will note though that you can speed up the kodi tmdb scraper if you go modify the source and disable it's pickle caching

[ashlar]

if you go modify the source and disable it's pickle caching

Anywhere I can read about this?

[izprtxqkft]

if you go modify the source and disable it's pickle caching

Anywhere I can read about this?

just something ive done

it appears only in tvshows scraper, still same improvements

disable saving cache here https://github.com/xbmc/metadata.tvshows...che.py#L60
disable loading it here https://github.com/xbmc/metadata.tvshows...che.py#L64

been awhile since i did it but as i recall the second function can be changed to just return none as if it got an exception

with a show it saves and loads the cache file on each and every episode, even though the cache file contains every single episode so it leads to a lot of saving and loading unnecessarily
most noticeable on shows with a lot of episodes, CSI Crime Scene Investigation comes to mind