[obveron]

what about the bulk of kodi plugins? are their compatibilty compromises using this box vs say a shield when it comes to plugins. how do plugins interact with the wrapper? is it seamless?

Video add-ons, for whatever reason, are a little sluggish to install/use w/Q5/Q10 Pro. Once installed, they work fine, but not as fluidly as on my Shield, Intel NUC and Pi3. As the wrapper is configured by HiMedia, I've found most (if not all) videos get pushed to the native player. Overall, for video add-ons, Kodi does a better job than native player. You can either bring up context menu on a video and choose Kodi's dvdplayer/videoplayer for playback, or modify the playercorefactory.xml by HiMedia to have all Internet-based streams play using Kodi (or at least I think you can do this).

Thanks for the great response! So the add-ons are faster and better when not played through the wrapper. but what is the quality of media playback through native kodi on this box without the wrapper? it doesn't have access to all the hardware, correct? will that mean no HD audio, or poor 1080p 23.97/24/60hz.