2023-03-24, 11:02
For anyone considering the N2 in 2023, it appears that CoreElec are dropping support for it with the next major version as they rely on an old kernel with proprietary blobs and the chipset developer seems to have a release and forget support process, so Kodi 21 based builds will not be available at least from the official releases.
It seems its possible to boot Libreelec on the N2 which uses the purely open source mainline kernel, but it seems efforts to develop open source versions of the proprietary drivers for video decoding have stalled so it can only do software decoding for some formats and as a result can't currently support 4K HVEC. Its unclear if any devs will step up and finish the decoder work which as an N2 owner is a bit of a downer and has made me reticent to invest in platforms not supported by mainline linux in future.
It seems its possible to boot Libreelec on the N2 which uses the purely open source mainline kernel, but it seems efforts to develop open source versions of the proprietary drivers for video decoding have stalled so it can only do software decoding for some formats and as a result can't currently support 4K HVEC. Its unclear if any devs will step up and finish the decoder work which as an N2 owner is a bit of a downer and has made me reticent to invest in platforms not supported by mainline linux in future.
