[noggin]

Do you guys recommend the new upcoming Odroid C2 over wetek core? Can't choose which one to get. I'll only use OpenElec on it (yes I need HEVC). Nothing else. It seems to be more futureproof with real 4k support/hdmi 2.0.

Mr. Wrxtasy, will you work on an OE for C2 or the Wetek build will do it?

Thanks!

EDIT: Sorry, it might not be the good forum thread.

Already answered regarding OE on the C2 in The Pick the Right Box thread. Not a good idea to double post across different threads....

Depends on your needs in the end and the 4K video content available to actually use the new features. New media box Hardware always leads video content thats available by a decent margin. Sometimes by the time the video content has caught up and is widely available, out comes new Hardware again, and so the cycle repeats itself. Limited 4K Netflix and Amazon content being the exceptions.

With AMLogic, the brand new Hardware is usually the most bug ridden too. Unless talented, dedicated devs put time and money into it fixing problems and don't rush media player boxes to market.

Yes - it has taken the C1/C1+ a long time to become a decent media player, and it has been out for a while now. There were a number of show-stopping bugs that took a long time to iron out, due to the limited dev effort and experience. (The most obvious was the major HDMI clock issue that meant you couldn't use your C1 with many AVRs as they suffered continuous video drop outs, and even without an AVR you got sound drop outs)

I suspect that we may have new issues with the C2 SoC (S905) that could take a while to find and fix, particularly as it is a move from 32 bit to 64 bit ARM architecture, which is quite new to the scene.

The thing that worries me the most about the C2 is the very old kernel that is being deployed with it. 3.14 LTS was released in March 2014, and ceases to receive long term support in August 2016 (i.e. 6 months time)

3.14 LTS is the 12th LTS kernel release, but the most recent is 4.4 LTS, which is the 15th LTS release and supported until Feb 2018.

I know there are reasons for kernels for some platforms to lag behind the current releases, but 3.14 is looking quite elderly, and will increasingly limit the platform. It's interesting to compare to the Raspberry Pi 2 - which is keeping pretty much up to date with the kernel releases it appears?

This isn't esoteric navel gazing either - a kernel this old will not include support for newer peripherals, like recent WiFi and DVB adapters. You are then at the mercy of being able to build and back port drivers to the kernel yourself, or rely on others to build things for you. wrxtasy does a splendid job with his OE builds, but if you want to run odroibian or other general linux distros, it all gets boringly hard very quickly when compared to x86 or the Pi 2 platform. (But not as bad as some of the dreadful Allwinner stuff... <shudder>)