[4nndee]

Hi guys,

I need some advice by the professionals. I gained my first experiences with Kodi (at that time openelec) with a Zotac Z-Box ID36. The box was too huge for my living room and I never used the BR drive. So I decided to sell the box and use my good old Raspberry Pi 1 with Kodi. Problem is, I'm not very satisfied with the performance of the Pi 1 at all. It is slow and the USB tuner I used to watch TV with does not work. I get some single frames and then the picture freezes completely.

I want to get some fresh hardware and would like to ask for some advice on what to buy. The box should be able to handle:
- normal operation (of course)
- USB TV tuner
- Retroarch/Retroplayer
- Network streaming

I was doing a survey and came up with the following "ideas":
- Raspberry Pi 2
- SolidRun CuBox
- Amazon FireTV
- Zotac Devic without optical drive

Does anyone use one of those devices and can recommend it (or maybe something else that matches my needs)?
Is it possible to replace the OS on the FireTV completely? As far as I now, you load Kodi like an App, but I don't want to have any Amazon shit on my box.

[noggin]

Pi 2 will work fine with a USB DVB-S/S2 or T/T2 tuner if the tuner has decent Linux support (which is true for using it with all Linux devices). I've had no real problems with a PCTV 290e or a first gen August T210 tuner, or a Technisat USB DVB-S2 satellite tuner with Pi 2s. I use TV Headend as the tuner backend, it's in the unofficial OE repo these days, and takes a little bit of config, but works well for me. There were issues with the Pi a while back, as the original USB drivers had some pretty nasty bugs that caused real problems with many DVB tuners. However these have been largely fixed on the platform - so the Pi and Pi 2 both now work better with DVB tuners than they once did.

I think the Cubox is very old now - you probably want to consider the Cubox-i instead (which is based on a different SoC). It has some limitations and some advantages compared to the Pi 2. You might also want to consider the Odroid C1 (some people prefer it to the Pi 2 for interlaced content).

Personally I'd also look very hard at the Chromebox. It is significantly more powerful than the ARM boxes, and does a brilliant job of deinterlacing (Motion Compensated deinterlacing is very good quality) and it will do a decent upscale of SD content.

Personally I'd always look at the Pi 2 for a low-cost solution, and then the Chromebox for a level of performance better. (There are also similarly specced machines to the Chromebox like the Zotac BI320 which are worth considering). The key thing in x86 boxes is that Haswell Celerons are significantly better with interlaced content then Baytrail Celerons. (So 2955U/2957U is preferable to N2820/N2830 etc.)

(The Pi 2 actually outperforms the x86 boxes in one area, 3D. The Pi 2 is the first Kodi platform with native 3D Full HD MVC replay with frame packed output. It's an amazing development for such a little, low-cost, box!)