[therippa]

It's probably been asked before on this thread, but it is loooong and old, so I'm asking (maybe) again:

I currently have a dedicated HTPC for Kodi.  It's well equipped with a Pentium Gold G5500 and a GT 1030 and plenty of ram (this is the second HTPC I've built, I've been running Kodi HTPC's for about 6 years now).  I'm running Windows for HDR and easy audio passthrough support for Atmos.  My problem over the last couple of years is, on a seemingly quarterly basis, videos suddenly become very finicky in Kodi, as in suddenly a tv show I watch in simple 1080p/24 will start stuttering until I mess around with resolution settings, or suddenly giant 80gb 4k/HDR rips will start stuttering.  I spend a few hours updating drivers, tweaking settings, reading old forum posts, and I can get it to work again.  Meanwhile, if I open the same file giving me problems in VLC, it plays just fine. Also, because of HDMI handshaking issues, Windows freaks out everytime I turn the TV off because it thinks it lost a "monitor".

And I'm sick of it.

I want a solution, money be damned, that will just check the following boxes:
- Play whatever I throw at it - be it an old blu-ray rip or a giant 4k/10-bit HR/atmos file, without skipping frames
- Be powerful enough to let me use the Aeon Nox skin, which I've come to love over years.
- Handle the IPTV streaming needs that happen three or four times a year because my wife likes watching the Grammys/Oscars/etc live

From everything I've read here and there over the course of the last year, the Vero 4k+ seems right for me.  I don't mind tinkering with things though (to a certain degree, now that I have a 7 month old and a toddler, so I'm limited on how much time I can spend on this, hence why I'm done with the Windows HTPC experience), and it seems the N2 with CoreELEC might do these things slightly better.

So I guess I have two questions:
1. Does the Vero 4k+ check all my boxes?
2. And is the N2 worth the extra hassle?

That would work for the 4K+, but it's worth being aware that BD-J menus won't work. You can still select the feature film though and other menus will work. That restriction applies for all ARM based platforms. 

Thanks.  I should have specified when I said rip I was just meaning an .mkv, not a BDRip.  Also, after an hour of messing around with things, I found the culprit - for some reason, even though nothing has changed, using Pixel Shaders as my render method (to support HDR in Kodi/Windows) now makes things stutter like hell.