[Esch30]

Hello, new user here.

I'm in the (long) process of completing a new home theater room.  To make a long story short, I purchased an 8th gen Core i3 Intel NUC last fall to use as a HTPC to play my BD/4K rips using MPC-HC w/ madvr.  One of the reasons I went this route was because I still had a 65" Panasonic plasma TV and I planned on using the aforementioned software to properly tone map and play the 4K discs/rips I've been purchasing in order to future-proof my collection.  All uncompressed rips are in .mkv format.  Fast forward to today, I now have an 85" Sony X900F, and I've realized that the lack of automatic dynamic range matching with my NUC is going to present a problem when it comes to seamlessly browsing my library, which I had planned on using KODI for.

I will have a 7.2.6 speaker setup, so Atmos & DTS:X audio pass-through is crucial.  From what I've read on these forums the last few days, the ODROID-N2 CoreELEC looks to be a device that will do what I want.  I will strictly be using it for KODI as I have an Apple 4K TV for all other streaming apps.

My main question is, and I feel silly for asking given my past experience with HTPCs, will I need to have a separate KODI "server" if I use a device like the ODROID-N2?  The NUC could serve (no pun intended) this purpose, but I'm wondering if KODI on the ODROID is all I would need to have a nice looking library with cover art and metadata, so long as I have my media available on the network.  I do not have a dedicated NAS at this point, but I could use the NUC with the directly attached storage as a host for my media for the time being and just point the ODROID to that if I don't need a separate KODI server.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.