Is NanoPi R6S a good candidate for a Kodi-based streamer?
#1
Lightbulb 
Compared to the rest of FriendlyElec's NanoPi collection, the R6S is the first one that supports HDMI 2.1 and AV1 hardware decoding. At $120 / $140 with a case it's near the price of common 'streamers' [1] like chromecast 4k or apple tv. The downsides are no built-in wifi so that would be extra cost/inconvenience, and no M.2 slot like the R5S so only USB or SDCard-based extra storage is available.

Does this seem like a good value option for a "future-proof" 8k capable streamer? My goal is to stream owned movies, music, and home videos from a central plex/jellyfish server to various 'endpoints' in my home (TVs, speakers, etc).

[1]: By 'streamer' I mean a small device that can stream/download content over a network and display it via HDMI.
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#2
Interesting device.  Thanks for the heads up.......  May purchase one just for a look see..
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#3
(2022-10-29, 02:20)infogulch Wrote: Compared to the rest of FriendlyElec's NanoPi collection, the R6S is the first one that supports HDMI 2.1 and AV1 hardware decoding. At $120 / $140 with a case it's near the price of common 'streamers' [1] like chromecast 4k or apple tv. The downsides are no built-in wifi so that would be extra cost/inconvenience, and no M.2 slot like the R5S so only USB or SDCard-based extra storage is available.

Does this seem like a good value option for a "future-proof" 8k capable streamer? My goal is to stream owned movies, music, and home videos from a central plex/jellyfish server to various 'endpoints' in my home (TVs, speakers, etc).

[1]: By 'streamer' I mean a small device that can stream/download content over a network and display it via HDMI.

I wouldn't be concerned by 8K just yet - nobody outside of Japan is really generating movie or TV show content in 8K, nor distributing in it.

Buy the device that works for you now and is cost effective. Buying for future-proofing isn't always a great idea for Kodi purposes.
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#4
After you add the price of shipping and duty the total price of a SBC can seem very high. 

Right now there are some optimized LE builds from balbes150  for the RK356x SBC's but they aren't stable enough for full time Kodi use.  I have a Quartz64a and it doe show what kernel 6.x will be capable of, but it is still too early to buy devices for the platform IMO

Martin
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#5
(2022-10-29, 15:58)noggin Wrote: I wouldn't be concerned by 8K just yet - nobody outside of Japan is really generating movie or TV show content in 8K ... Buying for future-proofing isn't always a great idea for Kodi purposes.
A fair point. Honestly I'm less concerned about 8K as much as hardware support for AV1 decoding. Storing video content in AV1 format could be a big space & bandwidth savings, especially for 4K content (which still extra, but not as pointless as 8K).
(2022-10-29, 23:46)emveepee Wrote: After you add the price of shipping and duty the total price of a SBC can seem very high. 
True. You'd also need a usb wifi dongle, power cable, and hdmi cable. All together it might be closer to $200 which is a bit much for the application. Depending on the price, maybe the Orange Pi 5 will be a slightly better candidate when it becomes available.

I guess my dream would be a chip with wide hardware codec support (including AV1), support 4k output, built-in wifi and bluetooth, 1G ethernet + PoE, under $80. Maybe it doesn't exist yet.
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#6
(2022-11-02, 23:15)infogulch Wrote: I guess my dream would be a chip with wide hardware codec support (including AV1), support 4k output, built-in wifi and bluetooth, 1G ethernet + PoE, under $80. Maybe it doesn't exist yet.
Except for POE that is often standard on the CoreElec-ne class of devices.  Newer Android devices will have often have h/w AV1 too.  DV support is the weakest link.

Martin
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#7
I guess I can drop PoE from "requirements" back to "nice-to-haves" alongside HDMI 2.1. PoE would be nice for "fully magic" one-cable installations, but in most cases its fine to just plug in a power adapter.

I wasn't aware of CoreELEC ( https://coreelec.org ), thanks for bringing it to my attention. That's probably a good target OS for a device like this.

What do you mean by "DV support", what does DV stand for?



I noticed that CoreELEC calls out Amlogic hardware in particular, and after some searching I found the TOX3 device (released in the last month or so it seems), which appears to have the exact hardware specs (and price!) that I'm looking for:

https://androidtvbox.eu/tox3-is-a-new-s9...-decoding/

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256801575900376.html
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#8
DV = Dolby Vision
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#9
Starting from 85$.

https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?r...uct_id=291

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9PD6fyFims
3 * Nvidia Shield + Synology NAS DS218+ LG 77CX6LA + Genelec + RasPi/rAudio + Adam T5V + T7V + T10S - ArcoLinux
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Is NanoPi R6S a good candidate for a Kodi-based streamer?0