I was recently gifted a rpi4 and I’m not entirely sure it’s an improvement over what I have. I currently use a t95k pro amlogic S912 running CoreElec. It’s kind of slow when scraping and navigating the menus. I set up the rpi4 with LibreElec and it definitely does both of those noticeably faster. Both are hardwired to a 1gb ethernet port, so I don’t believe it’s my internet speed causing this. Does one box offer more in terms of hardware decoding over the other? Basically, by switching to the rpi, am I sacrificing anything in terms of video or audio quality? For example I know the rpi4 can not hardware decode 4K h.264 but, I don’t know if the S912’s is capable. I’ve tried googling this and have gotten conflicting information. If the S912 is the more capable media player then I’ll deal with the slower ui.
I use TV Boxes S912 and I have never had problems decoding HDTV channels (usually 1920x1080i H264 and 3840x2160p HEVC), but I always use an output resolution to my TV of 1920x1080i50hz so that the GPU does not get too hot.
In relation to buying an S912 device I think that today it has been surpassed by the second and third generation of Amlogic CPUs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amlogic), the drawback is that the firmware is still in phase developmental.
I’ve not had many problems with the 2 S912’s that I have. My only complaint is they are slow to scrape and begin playback. The Pi just moves through that process and the menus 2-3x as fast. Maybe the odroid n2 would be the best of both worlds.
i’ve been using s912 for 4k HDR content for a few months. very good experience