TLDR: Get the Ugoos AM6B+ it’s just the best option in general, especially then if you want to use DV Profil 7 FEL or 3D movies. If you looking for a media player now, just get the Ugoos AM6B+, don’t cheap out on any alternatives, that look good on paper, but don deliver the promised features.
Longer post that is based purely on my personal experiences.
Since, I now own on of every type on the list, guess I can say something to all of them.
S905X4-J is just your okayish middle of the road android tv box, on the android side of things, it works good for all stuff that is media play-back with the normal apps, you get from the google tv store. It’s not groundbreakingly fast, but fast enough, just don’t expect any miracles xD
Coreelec works fine, best go with an fast USB SSD to get the most out of it. The problem comes with the SOCs Revision d, for this reason, I would not really recommend it. I need to able to playback interlaced h264 stuff, and my SoC Rev is D, I need to go with the -ne branch of Coreelec.
For that’s fine, my TV can’t use DV anyway, so I don’t care about that. But for people wanting Profil 7 FEL in S905X4-J, better not wanting to decode interlaced h264 and VC-1 stuff. xD
S922X-J it’s the somewhat older SoC, you get in the Ugoos AM6b+ Device, if you really need DV Profil 7 FEL that’s the Device to go for! Sure, you can also use the other branches on it like -ne, or -no and still have a really solid mediaplayer, just without DV. The other great development for this device was the visible cache for Kodi. S922X Ugoos AM6B Device Tree - Performance/Efficiency - Testing Needed This visible cache feature should become a standard, it lets Kodi behave much better when playing files in SW decoding mode, and make the load distribution better! (I mean, even the raspberry pi guys are doing this: Raspberry pi cache cpu0 )
It can even play 1080p AV1 SDR, in SW decoding if you need to.
S928X-J / S928X-K
It’s pretty new SoC, it will not support DV Profil 7 FEL ever, also does not support 3D! If you need any of this, this is NOT the SoC for you. The performance is a good step up from the S922x (well that was to be expected xD ) I didn’t test much on this platform so far, h264/h265 works solid on the last nightly -ne branch. Also did not see any h264 interlaced decoding problems. AV1 is hardware accelerated but I got some performance problems last time I tested it. (On the android side AV1 and AV1 with HDR10 sems to work fine) My guess it, it’s pretty much the “work in progress” SoC.
Still think it’s an interesting hardware in terms of performance, I would like that amlogic would spill some information, about the Caches (L1/L2/L3?) of this SoC, and NPU part of the Chip. It might be interesting, to be able to access the NPU, to load a core that processes the image better than the android AI-PQ and AI-SR things. (Not sure if that is even possible to do.)
I’m not in the DV Profil 7 FEL business at all, since my setup does not support it, and I will continue to ignore it. I can understand the fuzz about it, and that people want to use it, so if you have the right TV with the possibility for it, do it.