Hardware Recommendations

General
1

Hello,

I’m new to CoreELEC/Kodi and want to buy Hardware for it. Because I have some troubles finding the right information it would be nice to get some hardware recommendations to build my own box or to buy a ready-to-go box.

My requirements:

  • Netflix I want to stream 1080p Netflix and some public available german videos over Wifi. If I read correctly, with Kodi v18 it should be possible to stream Netflix without any problems. The only drawback is that with Amlogic boards it’s only possible to do software decoding, so you need a really strong CPU to stream 1080p. S905 is to slow and a decent SoC would be the RK3399 but it’s not supported by CoreELEC? S912 will not be supported in the future?
  • Games This is not a must have but it would be awesome to play some simple games
  • FLOSS I would like to use only free and libre software (except of Netflix DRM stuff), which implicates a libre designed board so that there are no proprietrary wifi, gpu and bluetooth drivers needed. I could also use a wifi and bluetooth through a USB stick if necessary
  • Stable right now and in the future I would love to have a board/box which is stable right now and which is seen as well supported in the future.
  • Affordable price About max. 100€ (=115$)

For me it seems a S905 board is not powerfull enough for streaming 1080p and gaming. Everything which is more powerfull does not have decent gpu drivers right now or in the future (like the S912 boards)? Odroid-N2 should work in the future but there is no official image available right now?

Is there anything which you could recommend for me?

2

Odroid N2 official is already available. Still marked as alpha but I use it on a daily basis. 1080p NF works but as always with these things it could change in widevine policy like it happened with Amazon Prime where they disabled videos over 480p. For the N2 you can look for an external wifi usb stick that uses free drivers. But some require firmware which is included so you need to research a bit. Also I find wifi not that reliable with Kodi and streaming in general but my router is not that good.

Also don’t think S912 is any faster. It uses big.little and is basically as fast as a S905 + crappy GPU driver support.

3

Yep, your best shot to checking off most of those boxes is the Odroid N2.
Re-wifi, you can buy a wifi dongle from HK, together with the N2. Note that if you order the N2, the power adapter is sold separately.

4

Thanks. I ordered one from ameridroid.com. Let’s see how it will work next week :wink:

5

I don’t think the S912 really has big little though it claims to, what it has is all cores throttled back to about 1.5ghz
At this stage the S912 is a complete dead end since the S922 has leapt ahead of it.

Shoog