[crótach]

Hi folks,

I'm looking for a second kodi box and I'm not impressed with the android ones. I got a wetek hub and it buffers and gets stuck quite often, and then I get tons of wife aggro. Especially now that we're at home all the time and she's trying to watch more shows.

My other box is an 8 year old zotac zbox id80 which works perfectly to this day, so I'm more inclined to go with a x86 kodi box. My library is on a NAS and I have the shares mounted as /storage/abc so I don't want to go for Nvidia shield where I can't mount the media in the same location.

Most of my media is 1080p h264 and I have some spare SATA SSDs that I can re-use. I have a 4k TV and it would be nice to have a box that's a bit future-proof if there are any out today.
Otherwise I'd prefer to have a reliable 1080p box.

Is there a box you can recommend? Like a NUC or a chromebox? My budget is around 200-300 euros.

Thanks!

[FXB78]

You might consider using Coreelec on the Wetek Hub rather than Android, I have one which works perfectly well using Coreelec booted from an SD Card. As long as you're not doing anything too intensive with it you shouldn't see any problems. The 1GB RAM is really not enough to be using Android but with Coreelec it's fine.

[crótach]

You might consider using Coreelec on the Wetek Hub rather than Android, I have one which works perfectly well using Coreelec booted from an SD Card. As long as you're not doing anything too intensive with it you shouldn't see any problems. The 1GB RAM is really not enough to be using Android but with Coreelec it's fine.

I'm using LibreELEC installed on the SD card. Is there much difference between CoreELEC and LibreELEC?

Mine was getting stuck at h264 1080p videos, and the audio is passthrough so it's not like it needs to decode any audio.

[FXB78]

CoreELEC will give you a slightly better performance than LibreELEC, it seems to use less RAM in my experience. I watch H264 1080p and even some HEVC 4K files without any problems so it's strange that you are seeing these issues.

It might be worth giving CoreELEC 9.2.1 a go to see if it works better for you before forking out for a new device. Also, check your advancedsettings.xml and don't have the cache too high as that caused frequent lock-ups for me, even removing the file & using default settings should be sufficient.

[crótach]

CoreELEC will give you a slightly better performance than LibreELEC, it seems to use less RAM in my experience. I watch H264 1080p and even some HEVC 4K files without any problems so it's strange that you are seeing these issues.

It might be worth giving CoreELEC 9.2.1 a go to see if it works better for you before forking out for a new device. Also, check your advancedsettings.xml and don't have the cache too high as that caused frequent lock-ups for me, even removing the file & using default settings should be sufficient.

I only have the database settings in there, nothing else.

Next time it locks up I'll log in via ssh and check the ram. 

I put the confluence skin on it, since that is what my wife was used to. Could the skin be using more memory and causing the problem?

[FXB78]

I wouldn't think Confluence would be a problem, it's quite a lightweight skin. Maybe turn on debug logging and have a look in the log to see if there are any obvious errors in there which could be the cause.