[shabuboy]

I have the celeron N3050 NUC. Wish I had gone something better (probably an i3) that had a bit faster clock speed and maybe more cores. I am having issues with certain files not playing smoothly, and when I went into the system monitor (I'm running Ubuntu), it has 1 (if not both) cores maxed out to 100% (this happens constantly if mythtv is recording anything).

With mythtv, I also find that playback sometimes freezes for up to 30sec and then fast forwards until it catches up. as soon as it freezes I look at the system monitor and the CPU is always maxed out.

IMHO the N3050 is not powerful enough for full blown HTPC in which lots of simultaneously task are taking place, as a media player only yes.
These days to use separate hardware is the popular choice.

[bossanova808]

Anyone have thoughts on - from a video quality perspective only really - Windows vs. OE. I know the benefits/costs of both, but I am curious as to how far the windows video stuff is along vs. the EGL build.

[smitopher]

I have not run Windows on my Pentium NUC so I can't comment about Windows video quality.

the BLEEDING EDGE Kodi V17 EGL builds are very very good at playback, much better than OpenElec 6.0 (Kodi 15.2).

Now, the EGL development builds are, by definition, unstable. And they change almost daily. Some of the builds seem to be pretty stable, other days there can be many crashes.

Unlike Tortuga, I do not have anyone to annoy with my media center hobby so I live with the lack of stability cuz I do like the picture quality and de-interlacing and I can deal with it when Kodi get balky.

[bossanova808]

Yep I am following the EGL progress, but for other reasons I need to use Winblows, so I am curious if anyone has tried both...

[Tortuga]

I have not run Windows on my Pentium NUC so I can't comment about Windows video quality.

the BLEEDING EDGE Kodi V17 EGL builds are very very good at playback, much better than OpenElec 6.0 (Kodi 15.2).

Now, the EGL development builds are, by definition, unstable. And they change almost daily. Some of the builds seem to be pretty stable, other days there can be many crashes.

Unlike Tortuga, I do not have anyone to annoy with my media center hobby so I live with the lack of stability cuz I do like the picture quality and de-interlacing and I can deal with it when Kodi get balky.

That would be nice! My daughter is just one, so she doesn't speak up about it too much, and my wife is pretty understanding. So some days I do work on updates/improvements. The 15.2 Fritsch built has the EGL changes, so video quality and color reproduction are very good. I believe the video player was completely redone in v17, so I bet it's even better there. I'll probably jump on it sometime in the future.

I did run Windows on my all-in-one box with a Haswell Pentium for a while. I notice that Flash video played in a browser looks better via Windows than Chromium in OE. But playback quality within Kodi looks great in both. I'd say color accuracy must be better in this OE version, but the difference in my content (DVDs and full Bluray rips) is not terribly noticeable. It probably would be when viewed side by side. Plus, OE just works so much better than running a full Windows OS. I needed quite a few work-arounds (Kodi Launcher helps a lot) to get things working like a STB on Windows.

[onizuka]

Yep I am following the EGL progress, but for other reasons I need to use Winblows, so I am curious if anyone has tried both...

+1 Need XBONE and PS4 streaming so OPENELEC is out.