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START HERE - Pick the Right Kodi Box (updated Dec 2020)
(2016-07-08, 15:49)popcornmix Wrote: The raspberry pi is a very mature and stable platform. It has been running xbmc/kodi for four years.
The four year old Pi1 is still supported, and receives regular firmware/kernel updates and still runs the latest kodi.
I don't think there are any other 4 year old ARM devices that can still run the latest kodi.
Yes partially agree, but you are going to have to do better than that Wink
AML8726-MX SoC released in 2012 - contained in the WeTek Play - receives regular Firmware / Kernel updates from WeTek and runs OpenELEC or LibreELEC Jarvis.

My question is - what is the future for the GPU/VPU in the RPi series of devices, I would anticipate another SoC update soon at least increasing the GHz Clock speed but what about the GPU/VPU - that is looking positively ancient for a HD Audio / HEVC / 2160p era ?

If there were actual 2160p sources to play on it you might have a valid point, but there aren't. You can rip UHD BD. Netflix isn't going to provide UHD for those S905 boxes. So, you can't play a few UHD demo files or UHD/4k YouTube at full native res. Big whoop... Why sweat support of useless formats that no useable content is in?

So, something like a Shield which has UHD Netflix if your UHD TV doesn't, or an actual HTPC that has enough GPU to make good use of madVR very high quality algorithms for scaling up all your non UHD content are the only two options that make any sense to me if you're insistent on HDMI 2.0 UHD output.
Most people, even in 2016, still don't care about HD audio, HEVC, or 4K. You don't buy a sub $50 device for bleeding edge technology. Things like Gig Ethernet is still not needed on a playback device. I think you have to look at it as a different type of device. For anyone with a 1080 TV it is still a fantastic recommendation.

The Pi gives probably the best support for core features than any other platform. I work for a company that makes Amlogic boxes, but honestly, the Pi still impresses me more than any other platform. It really shows how the latest specs mean nothing. Imagine if even just one Amlogic SoC had squeezed out every ounce of potential, getting the most out of it like the Pi family has.

It shouldn't be this good. It actually defies conventional wisdom. It really is old and outdated hardware. The Pi is an abnormality. I'm pretty sure there is some kind of dark magic involved.
New to Kodi and been reading here for a couple of hours tonight...it's really kind of overwhelming the amount of choices for a good Kodi box. I'm mostly interested in doing IPTV (cord-cutter), especially sports, NFL, etc. 1080p HD and no buffering etc are dealbreakers. I'll probably be hooking it up to my projector and displaying a 120 inch+ picture so image quality is important. Suggestions?
Budget media player perspective...

Ah well too bad if you want to view 10bit 4K HEVC video from your smart phone, or live in the real world of 10bit 1080p HEVC content that abounds on the internet... you would have to be ignorant if you have not seen what users would be viewing in the wild on a budget Kodi media player. All those users would care about is video decoding and nothing else.

I have over a dozen of these Android boxes, including a Nexus Player, but my new $35 (now$38) R-Box kicks butt. It is a budget Rockchip SoC (I don't like Rockchip),, but the video quality is the best I have ever seen, it also, plays HD audio out of the box. As all oof these *cheap* Android boxes, it only plays Netflix in DVD quality.

http://www.geekbuying.com/item/R-BOX-And...68030.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDwVKHt6GYk

Edit, I failed to mention that this $35 R-Box is the only Android box that I have, including the Nexus Player and Minix X8-H Plus, that plays my BlueRay ripped videos encoded in VC-1 flawlessly. My copy of the Dirty Dozen (my favorite, had DVD but had to purchase it on BlueRay) is encoded with VC1 and it plays perfectly.

Edit 2: I have purchased all of my boxes with my hard earned $$$, except for my ADT-1 from Google, and my RK3288 box that Beelink gave me about 3 years ago.

Edit 3: I have no Pi or Nvida Shield to compare.
(2016-07-09, 06:36)wrxtasy Wrote: Budget media player perspective...

Ah well too bad if you want to view 10bit 4K HEVC video from your smart phone, or live in the real world of 10bit 1080p HEVC content that abounds on the internet... you would have to be ignorant if you have not seen what users would be viewing in the wild on a budget Kodi media player. All those users would care about is video decoding and nothing else.

Where is this content? I have to hunt for it because I'm supposed to be testing these kinds of things, and it's very hard to find. 10bit HEVC 1080 content is almost as common as a unicorn.

Even if we, dare I say, look at the pirate scene. Hell, why not. Even there, the vast majority of content is still in h.264/AVC. Even in the anime scene, which goes pants-on-head retarded with Hi10P, most content is still High Profile (*cough*horriblesubshavehighestdownloadnumbers*cough*).

No matter how you slice it, HEVC, 4k, and HD audio are not used by majority of users. We live in a world were MPEG2 is somehow still important. MPEG2! That's older than dirt, for crying out loud. These are exciting new technologies, for sure, but don't overstate them. Nothing gets on my nerves more than someone saying things like ATMOS or HDR is essential to watching a movie in 2016. All I do all day is work with end users, most of which don't even know what those things are.
HD audio is not even a no-go on Pi2/3.
Just bitstreaming is not possible, PCM passthrough works like a charm.

If someone wants the full HDMI 2.0 + HEVC + 10bit + HDR experience they should go for a SHIELD or maybe later an S905 (or just wait for actual content Tongue).
...But to be honest I'm not a friend of in-between solutions that might be able to handle HEVC but cannot output HDMI 2.0 including HDR.

I'm even still a bit sceptical about the SHIELD because Dolby Vision and HDR10 with dynamic metadata are an if.
@ned Scott, do some development work - testing decoding and looking for samples and you will soon see plenty of 10bit content popping up all over the place.

As an example I just searched for "10 bit Eurocup 2160p HEVC" and all sorts of content pops up. To say users are not viewing this is is like burying your head in the sand and just being plain ignorant.
Cmon this is not rocket science Wink

I could search google for some VC-1 content in an .avi with sanskrit subtitles, but that doesn't make it common. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying that most people don't care or need those features yet.

Possible to find != common, let alone necessary.

Even when it becomes common, that still doesn't mean anything to the user who has their own personal library and isn't interested in playing random files from the internet.

The fact remains, the Pi 3 is not "outdated" and is still a damn good recommendation.
(2016-07-09, 12:01)Ned Scott Wrote: I could search google for some VC-1 content in an .avi with sanskrit subtitles, but that doesn't make it common. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying that most people don't care or need those features yet.

Possible to find != common, let alone necessary.

Even when it becomes common, that still doesn't mean anything to the user who has their own personal library and isn't interested in playing random files from the internet.

The fact remains, the Pi 3 is not "outdated" and is still a damn good recommendation.

Look up some To-r-rent sites and HEVC is the rage - small sizes. x264 is being pushed out slowly.

To that end, wrxtasy - What's the most inexpensive 1080p HEVC kodi box today (with or without 4K upscaling.. maybe 4K TV/Display will do its own upscaling) ?
(2016-07-09, 21:01)crashnburn Wrote:
(2016-07-09, 12:01)Ned Scott Wrote: I could search google for some VC-1 content in an .avi with sanskrit subtitles, but that doesn't make it common. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying that most people don't care or need those features yet.

Possible to find != common, let alone necessary.

Even when it becomes common, that still doesn't mean anything to the user who has their own personal library and isn't interested in playing random files from the internet.

The fact remains, the Pi 3 is not "outdated" and is still a damn good recommendation.

Look up some To-r-rent sites and HEVC is the rage - small sizes. x264 is being pushed out slowly.

To that end, wrxtasy - What's the most inexpensive 1080p HEVC kodi box today (with or without 4K upscaling.. maybe 4K TV/Display will do its own upscaling) ?

I'll humor you: If you're going to pirate your videos, and there are just as many (if not more) h.264 files as there are h.265 files to chose from, and you specifically bought a player that only has h.264 hardware decoding, then why the hell would you download h.265? The idea that you need an h.265/HEVC device (in relation to torrenting) implies you have no other options, or are too stupid to understand what torrents are being clicked on.

Being "the rage" does not change what is available, what you can choose from, or what people rip themselves. Casually looking at some random torrents does not give any realistic data about what most people are using. The average joe will download whatever torrent has the most seeds, anyways. The most popular torrents for a given show or movie have god awful quality. Remember YIFY? That was some garbage, and yet more people were downloading those torrents than others. So tell me, how the heck does that data prove anything, one way or another?


Now that we have that out of the way:

This is not the place to talk about the pirate scene's requirements. This is the official Kodi forum. We cater to the user who is backing up their own media on their own hard drives, or who is otherwise using legitimate sources for video. No one should come here looking for advice about what is "all the rage" in the pirate scene.


EDIT: I'm very sorry for the harsh response above. There was no need to be so aggressive and rude. The same basic message is still true, but I should not have said it in such a tone.
(2016-07-08, 23:14)lords8n Wrote: popcornmix - Can you offer some insight into OSMC vs OpenELEC vs LibreELEC? I tinkered with OSMC a bit with my Pi1 but I seemed to notice in the forums a lot of users leaning toward LibreELEC. Any signifcant difference (performance or otherwise) between them? Thanks.

At the moment, OpenELEC hasn't had any git activity for 2 months and hasn't released a stable Jarvis build so I wouldn't recommend that.

OSMC and LibreELEC are both great. It's hard to say which is better.
They both run pretty much the same Kodi so behaviour and performance will be similar.

OSMC ships with their own skin as a default, which some prefer and some don't, but it easy to switch.
OSMC has the debian system behind it, so installing packages is generally easier.
LibreELEC is small and compact, and with most of the OS read only, it is more appliance like and harder to break.
LibreELEC is very good for bleeding edge builds, with latest patches, kernel and firmware produced every night (look out for the Milhouse builds).

Give them both a try and see what you think.
Yes I agree with Popcornmix and would add LibreELEC has a whole team of developers behind it that split from OpenELEC so consequently improvements and bugs get squashed a whole lot quicker.
OpenELEC has turned, really into a near solo developer project now.

@ned Scott,
We are going to have to agree to disagree, for some users the RPi3 is definitely outdated hardware. For a bunch its ideal bang for the buck Kodi hardware.
You should see the RPi hardware comments in the LibreELEC ODROID C2 dev. HardKernel sub-forum, from upgrading RPi2 owners that have bailed out of the RPi upgrade cycle to get an idea.

When I cannot view 4K HEVC video clips taken from my own smartphone on a RPi3 it ceases to fill my Kodi media player requirements in the year 2016. This is not some unrealistic expectation other users would be having as well.

All I'm doing is presenting options to users about what Codecs they are likely to encounter and what hardware will be required for decoding going forward.

(2016-07-09, 21:01)crashnburn Wrote: To that end, wrxtasy - What's the most inexpensive 1080p HEVC kodi box today (with or without 4K upscaling.. maybe 4K TV/Display will do its own upscaling) ?
I would actually get a AMLogic S905 for its 10bit 1080p decoding capabilities at this point in time. A AMLogic S805 will handle 1080p 8bit HEVC easily, and some supported LE devices are listed here:
https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread-200.html

I've also just finished a LibreELEC build for the S805 ODROID C1 that works really well.

All the S905 4K HEVC boxes are listed in this thread:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=255686

The S905 actually does decent 480/576/720/1080p --->> 2160p upscaling in its hardware. You can easily run the Kodi GUI in 2160p60Hz. I have the C2 and Hub configured and LibreELEC modded, to only autoswitch to 2160p for 2160p content and let my 4K TV handle all the other upscaling.

My requirements are a pc or android box
Which can playback all formats including h.265 10bit
Dts hd 7.1 passthrough
Without stutters like the himedia q10
It doesnt have to support 3d
Main thing is picture quality and codec support and kodi support

have a intel 2955u and so far been great until
Now x265 videos dont playback properly stuttering video problems

I have various mkv movie i ripped in different
Framerates and formats x264 x265 10bit

Should i buy a newer pc i3 or i5
Or a kodi box?
After reading these forums it seems to point towards
An intel nuc i3+ or nvidia shield or wetek hub but they all seem
To report problems with different formats.


I do not have a 4k tv
But like to be able to playback 10bit h.265
Is this possible with better hardware i dont care if
Its not displayed as 4k
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