[noggin]

Seems to boot to a desktop in like 15 seconds from a microSD card. I'm really happy with the way it runs. It's been really stable so far as well, but I honestly haven't had much time to play with it. I did the huge apt-get upgrade and a dist-upgrade. They took a good while, but it all seemed to go very smoothly. I haven't tried Android yet, but I will as soon as I get another flash card.

I'd seriously recommend eMMC if you are serious about using the C2 long-term. It's really quick. The Ubuntu boot speed is incredibly quick. I just timed it at around 15" too though, so maybe boot isn't time isn't dictated purely by storage speed.

Too bad no USB3 or SATA connector, but I still like it a lot.

Less a case of no connectors, more a case that the S905 doesn't support them. SATA would need to be implemented via a USB2.0->SATA bridge - so no real point including it.

Bluetooth and WiFi would have been cool, but certainly not a deal breaker for me.

Yes - they would be useful - but can see why they were left off. The cost of testing would be prohibitive. The Pi foundation blogged about how much they had to spend to get the Pi 3 approved (which is why it doesn't have external antenna connectors fitted)

The Pi3 is "nifty", but this device is really putting the Pi developers in the hot seat for needing to catch up to this level of performance.

I'm not sure the ODroid is massively on the Pi Foundation's horizon. The C2 isn't aimed at the Pi Foundation target market - which is education.

Where the Pi still wins is in support. There are far fewer rough edges on the Pi 1/2/3/Zero than on the C1/C1+. Development of the kernel for the C1/C1+ seems to have stopped (forgive me if I'm wrong on this - but when I asked in the ODroid forums I was told there were no plans for newer kernel support), and I don't see much new stuff coming out from Hardkernel for it. The Pi Foundation is still updating code that will work on the original 2012 Model B. wrxtasy is great at pushing out new OpenElec builds for the C1 - but he's a one-man band and if he stops we're probably stuffed. On paper the C1 is better than the Pi2. The Pi 2 is still, IMHO, a better supported platform and what I'd recommended as a Kodi platform until the Pi 3 came out (unless you want Netflix, then the Core is good if you are happy with stereo audio only)

Sure the C2 is more powerful than the Pi 3 in hardware terms. HDMI 2. (even 4:2:0 only) and HEVC 10 bit hardware decode (even if with some flaws) is still an amazing improvement. eMMC and a faster clock speed are great. Gigabit Ethernet and two USB 2.0 buses not shared (the 4 Type A are on one bus and the OTG is on another I believe, with the GigE separate again) On paper it blows the Pi out of the water.

But then you realise you are limited to PCM 2.0 audio (driver not hardware limit), no Frame Packed 1080p 3D output (probably driver limit but who knows), and currenty even DD/DTS bitstreaming is flawed. No sign at the moment of the work done by Wetek to add HD Audio bitstreaming and PCM 5.1/7.1 in Android appearing on the C2 (even though the hardware should support it the route used may not be available to ODroid currently).

Sure - it will hopefully include HD Audio or PCM 5.1/7.1 - but Hardkernel appear to be very tied to AMLogic in development terms, and not really driving things. The Pi has the advantage of developers who can really get to the 'bare metal' in driver/firmware terms. 3D MVC decode appeared because a Pi dev wanted to implement it. So they did.

Multichannel PCM audio support over HDMI was there since the early days, because the drivers were implemented right pretty early on.

And I am still smarting over Hardkernel's approach to the C1 HDMI drop-outs. The fault was in the C1 config, but everything else was blamed... (It wasn't until some of us pointed out that a similar problem had briefly hit the Pi and been fixed by changing the way the HDMI clock was altered to keep things in sync that a non-HK (I think) dev tweaked the HDMI Clock settings and fixed it... Hardkernel appeared to have given up.)

I want to install Kodi and try that out, but the apt archive only has 15.2 Isengard available. All of my recordings in my MythTV backend are MPEG-2 also, so I believe that's going to be a problem for a while, assuming I understood what I've read so far about the S905 support. I believe that there is no hardware deinterlacing for MPEG-2. I'm hoping that there is hardware decompression for it though. I know it will all come along eventually.

There's a good thread at getting a newer build of Kodi running with hardware acceleration over at the ODroid forums. I've got it running on mine. Fixed with PCM 2.0 output at the moment (I've not looked harder to see if I need to fiddle with ALSA/PulseAudio stuff - there are simply no passthrough options available in Kodi) Changing screen resolution is fun (when I start Kodi at 3840x2160 I runs with a 1280x720 GUI top left, and you have to read through screens of overlaid garbage to correctly set 3840x2160 GUI, and then Exit and Restart Kodi).

I think the Android + Wetek Media Player experience is probably better. It has DD/DTS output - albeit with drop outs.

How long do you think it will be before OpenELEC is ready for the S905?

Be interesting to see. The differences between C2 and C1 are non-trivial apparently. But OpenElec is surely the holy grail, along with better audio support.

Don't get me wrong - I know why there are big differences between the maturity and quality of support on the Pi vs the C1/C2, and I want the C1/C2 to succeed (I own both) However I really don't think Hardkernel are driving what the Pi foundation does. The Pi 3 will have been in development long before the C2 announcement, similarly the Pi 2 and the C1. They arrive at roughly the same time as that is when the SoC technology matures at the right price point.