Over the course of the past year I have donated a new OLED TV plus €100 towards Kodi’s development. I respect the developers work but I would like the same respect to be extended to me by not considering me automatically cheap.
I only spoke about donations because I cannot code. As such I don’t know another way to help.
Cheers.
Hmmmmmm
Seems was not directed at you in general (users)
Just Humor!!
Back to the Thread Title
Currently hands down best Box for 2024 is The Ugoos Am6b Plus .!!!
As far as the 4.9 kernel goes its the Bomb !!!
Most Excellent
Cant get much more out of it.
Like Michael Jordan after 6th Championship
Got nothing left to Prove !!!
Mike Drop
Time to move on
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires There is no greater guilt than discontentment And there is no greater disaster than greed. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Since this thread is mostly about video decoding support so far, do you have any preference between the S922 and S905x4 in terms of actual audio playback support, i.e. decoding (to multichannel PCM) and not just demultiplexing, i.e. bitstreaming the usual suspects such as TrueHD, DD+, DTS(HD)-MA?
I don’t know about S922 because I own an S905x4 but this is beside the point. Decoding multi-channel audio is done in software and FFMPEG is behind it in Kodi on CoreELEC. FFMPEG supports everything so no problem decoding any audio stream.
If you’re only using a TV, everything will work and you may have to just play with some settings in Kodi to preserve volume when decoding multi-channel and sending to a stereo output (your TV). This could be a benefit since a lot of modern TVs don’t support DTS (any variant of it) to the point that they can’t even stream it to the AVR via eARC. Dolby vs DTS wars as usual. Same thing for Dolby Atmos which is not supported by the TV but only bit-streamed to an AVR or soundbar. Anyway, Kodi is configurable enough to select which formats are decoded and which are bit-streamed.
Things are a bit more subtle when using an AVR depending on your speakers layout. As long as you only have 8 physical speakers at most (ie: 5.1 or 7.1 as usual) you can still decode all audio to multi-channel PCM and everything will work as expected. HDMI only supports 8 channels.
But, if have more than 8 physical speakers, then you really should bitstream, otherwise you’ll lose the benefits of all formats using “objects” which contain metadata on where (ie: which speaker) to play the sound.
Except some rare cases of bugs in an AVR incapable of decoding a specific bitstream, there’s no benefit in decoding channels to PCM, especially on the ARM devices we use because most of the time they are under powered and waste valuable resources decoding multi-channel audio.
@boxr4k Thanks a lot.
If the decoding is handled by FFMPEG, then the SoC should indeed not matter as long as it’s fast enough.
I asked because the Zidoo Z9X for instance, although at least somewhat supporting Kodi, doesn’t decode DD TrueHD, DD+ or DTS-HD MA to multichannel PCM but stereo only due to the licensing fuss. At least, it can convert the actually also unnecessary format DD+ to regular AC3 but that via S/PDIF only and not HDMI. Silly and annoying.
Yes, am aware of the object-based stuff; for now, I’m fine with 5.1 and my good old Denon horse only supports AC3, DTS and said multichannel PCM.
I may be a bit slow but I don’t think that the best device for CoreELEC is a X86 one. I think that we can all agree that there’s a nice thread about devices for Kodi on the Kodi forum and a thread for CoreELEC devices here, so Amlogic devices. Don’t disperse, please.
Back on topic…
For CE I have an TOX3. S905x4 Gbit
Not DV but I don’t need that only HDR (Samsung TV’s)
Just works and for some of us poorer people $64au~ currently.
Do any of the CoreELEC devices discussed here currently support 120Hz HDMI output?
Looking at the specs of the S922X, it sounds like it should at least be able to output 1080p@120Hz over its HDMI 2.0 port and maybe even 2160p@120Hz with chrome subsampling (8-bit YCbCr 420). The S928X with 48 Gbps HDMI 2.1 should be able to handle these formats at 10-bits without requiring subsampling.
If anyone has their device connected to an HDMI 2.1 TV, can you please confirm which HDMI formats are selectable in the CoreELEC menus? Thanks.
I’m running my Am6b+ at 1080p at 120hz.
1080p@120hz and 2160p@60hz on the S922X.
You’d need to step up to the A311D2 and S928X for 2160p@120Hz.
Unsure if the s905x4 can do 2160p@120Hz in CE, I don’t think so.
Thanks. Is only 120.0Hz available or also 119.88Hz? That would allow 23.976 fps content to play smoothly without having to switch GUI video mode since each frame could be repeated exactly 5 times. 59.94 fps content frames could be repeated 2 times.
He literally expained this in his question…
Corelec can play video at the native refresh rate if you enable the whitelist.
Hi, I tried out the Ugoos AM8 Pro as it looks a good candidate for Coreelec on paper. Nice cast aluminium box with very large heatsink all over the board, ventilation slots at the bottom, many USB 3.x connectors, WIFI6, 2 external antennas, BT 5.3, gigabit ethernet … what is not to like? Since it was lightning fast with both booting and running on Android I did not even try Coreelec. Fastest box I have had till now.
It boots with the Amlogic logo changing from normal to odd colors?! What immediately did catch my eye was the picture quality that is less good than that of my TOX3. I don’t know if this is typical for AM8 Pro or Amlogic S928X but either way I thought it may be useful information to some. Also managed to have it rebooting a few times just by operating it but just after I sold it a new firmware 1.4.0 (it had 1.3.9 beta) came out so maybe that is solved.
So despite its way lower price and having less features (which I don’t use anyway) the TOX3 stayed and the AM8 Pro went. Only thing I really miss is a digital audio output on TOX3.
I get digital using HDMI into my receiver.
A few months back I saw an AM8 Pro for 110€ and jumped on it, hoping it would receive FEL support. Had it on for a few minutes, totally worthless without FEL but I thought, well, if it doesn’t get FEL I’ll sell it to some silly person that thinks RAM and ROM are what’s relevant. As we all know by now, no FEL, so I’ve put it for sale, to my surprise, not many silly people out there, had quite some trouble selling it. Managed, with a little profit. Bought a second minix u22. Now, I have 2 am6b+ that I use daily, and 2 minix u22 as reserve options.
Why deal with refresh rate changes and temporary TV signal loss when you can just run everything (including GUI) with a default refresh rate (like 119.88Hz) that handles most of your media? 99% of my content is either 23.976, 59.94, or 119.88 (game recordings) so a device that supports 119.88Hz at 2160p would be ideal for me.
Another reason someone might prefer this approach is that certain TV models do not correctly display 23.976Hz signals. They randomly drop or repeat frames when converting the signal to panel’s native 120Hz. By sending the TV a 119.88Hz signal, you can avoid such problems.
A HTPC works fine at 2160p@120Hz, but I would prefer to find a cheaper, smaller, and more power efficient solution.
Can someone with a S928X device check if 3840x2160 is available at 119.88Hz either in Coreelec or Android? You must be connected to an HDMI 2.1 TV. Sometimes you also have to enable enhanced HDMI support in the TV input menus so that EDID includes high refresh modes.
Running ugoos sk1 here with 120 Hz. It also supports 119.88 Hz both in android and coreelec.
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