[poofyhairguy]

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.

Kodi runs on the Odroid N2 directly (actually with CoreElec it runs on a stripped down version of the Linux desktop plus Kodi), including a local library with cover art and all. 

The limitation here is that library is then locked to that N2, which means you can't share your library with another Kodi box down the line for some other TV. If you don't ever care about that then you are set.