[noggin]

Sharpey,
How about this one?
https://www.adafruit.com/products/3055?g...fgodxO4FFg

Thanks for the reply.

I have thought about the Pi but always saw it as a low tech solution, but this was when it first came out, I'm guessing it has improved?

Yes - both Kodi and the hardware have improved. The latest Pi3 has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth and rather than a single 700MHz core based on an old architecture it now has a 1.2GHz Quad Core Cortex A53 SoC (now 64 bit - though current software is still 32 bit) It runs OpenElec/LibreElec incredibly well.

The original Pi was a nice novelty, the Pi 2 became a perfectly sensible Kodi box. The Pi3 is even better.

Does Kodi genuinely run smoothly on it, even with a skin like Aeon Nox?

I don't run Aeon Nox so can't comment. However Confluence and Estuary are incredibly fluid (though you may see a drop in rendering fps when the Pi 3 is playing back video)

Do you still have to buy codecs for it?

If you want to play MPEG2 or VC-1 then although some software decode is now possible, it is definitely sensible to pay the £3.60 for the pair of codecs.

Is video decoded by the hardware?

MPEG2, VC-1 and H264 are hardware decoded (the VC-1 and MPEG2 licences enable the OS to use the hardware decoders).

HEVC is decoded with a combination of CPU and GPU-compute decoding (not via the hardware VPU). As a result the Pi3 will decode almost all 720p and many, but not all, 1080p HEVC files.

Sorry for all the questions.

Most important to me is glitch free playback of HD MKV files (some have DTS 5.1 soundtracks), if it can do that then absolutely I would look at getting one. Ultimately I can't get a device that doesn't run smoothly as it is not for me, but for a technophobic family

DD/DTS will either be bitstreamed over HDMI, or will be decoded to PCM 5.1. HD Audio will be losslessly decoded to 5.1/7.1PCM (other than the handful of 192kHz 5.1 tracks)

The Pi 3 happily plays full quality un-recompressed Blu-ray rips (so 40Mbs video streams with HD Audio) and has no problems with proper 23.976p output. It also handles 3D MVC decode and 1080p Full HD Frame Packed output - which is very unusual. I use Pi 3s as secondary viewing location players and they are excellent.

It really is very good indeed. And for the money it's amazing. (There are a couple of other very low cost solutions appearing - but the Pi 3 definitely has the most stable and most polished experience at the moment, and with multichannel PCM audio and 3D MVC+FP output it's close to impossible to beat in those regards).