2015-02-21, 00:38
(2015-02-20, 07:20)MrCrispy Wrote: What is the actual speed difference in GUI on ARM vs x86 (i.e. Android vs Chromebox/HTPC) ? Is it really night and day for large libraries?
There has been lot of talk in the other threads about how some of these boxes have their own internal players that can playback 3D ISO as well as HD passthru.
Quote:The only way it does what it does is by replacing the default Kodi video player, like we used to do with DS Player. That means that it is a dead end, and as soon as we get Kodi 15 or whatever it will be a piece of abandonware most likely as Himedia moves onto the next box. I only like recommending solutions with fairly broad community support that use standard Kodi features, because that means it will work fine with future versions of the software. The Himedia box is a hack designed to get around current limitations that will be like a time capsule of our current limitations years from now. A Chromebox will improve with every update. The VidOn Box isn't perfect, but I feel they are providing better community support than Himedia and at least they aren't pretending they have a Kodi solution.
I agree with this, but I don't understand why current boxes will become abandonware with the next version of Kodi? Is that generally what's happened in the past? AFAIK they just run the regular Android version of Kodi, with the only 'hack' being the workaround to use the external player, which is fully supported in Kodi.
I'm going to quote some near 2 year old data, but I used XBMC on an Apple TV2 and it scarred me it was such a horrific experience. The CPU was just, just fast enough and the flash ram was mediocre, meaning on a huge library, navigating it meant crappy slow thumbnails to pull up.
My MiniITX machine with a small cheap SSD and cheap Pentium thrashes it completely, library navigation is a breeze, even at 2200 movies, 70+ TV shows.
Since my data is 2 years old though and it's 2015, you'd think we'd be close to being able to have sub $199 Android boxes with some actual grunt. I know the Samsung S6 is rumoured to use some kind of new fancy flash memory which is about 3x faster than old flash ram. When this kind of stuff is common place, perhaps navigating a large library won't be so difficult.
I'll keep my eye on these threads but I'm not convinced even in 2015, there's 'definitive' XBMC / Kodi machine available yet, still. Which has eth / wifi / couple of USB ports, HDMI out, under $200 and it's REALLY more than powerful enough for 1080p and or x.265 encodes of anime for example.