I loved my odroid n2+ for its performance in linux “homeautomation/monitoring”-stuff, and when I had the chance to get a new tv 3 years ago I was blown away by coreelecs capabilities. I didn’t even know hdmi-cec existed and it was like magic when that just worked out of the box.
Over the first 2 years I installed a lot of crap and it felt buggy and I reinstalled CE.
End of story? Through the years I always wondered about LE. Now it supports Amlogic, while I previously had understood that that is what CE was for.
I don’t understand now, whether I can try LE on it or not. I had trouble when I tried once for some hours.
I just wanted to know from someone who knows, whether LE really is an alternative to CE on that device and whether you think I should check it out.
If e.g. hdmi-cec support and also game emulation support wouldn’t be in LE as good as CE, I could put the topic of LE to rest.
If someone of you says it’s worth a shot because it’s better in some way (user interface, video player, ?) I would be convinced to continue my effort on making it run.
Basically: What’s the difference between LE and CE at this point in time, why do we have 2 kodi distributions for amlogic now?
I don’t need to try to know the results. CoreELEC have been working solely on Amlogic for close to a decade, and you have LibreELEC who have to support everything and the kitchen sink. And CoreELEC have supported the N2(+) for 6 years. You have a specific image for N2(+), does LibreELEC have specific images? I highly doubt it. they have to many to cater for.
Also with the nightly you have improved performance (as much as 25% for certain tasks)
install the nightly and report back.
We also have a community build that has Dolby Vision Support, I doubt LibreELEC has that.
you’ve had 6 years of support and now come on here and say it feels shit and moving to another OS.
I doubt one person on here wants to leave CoreELEC to try LibreELEC, not on Amlogic devices. I’m just astounded how amazing CoreELEC is. It’s turned my N2+ into an N3 , just with software enhancements.
end rant
Or if I may rephrase my question: Who uses LE on N2+? My guess would be someone who uses LE’s ecosystem’s features that CE doesn’t have (??? would be interesting to know a real usecase from someone who has one), or just tried LE first and was happy with everything / doesn’t need more, or it has to do with something like language features (only taiwanese plugins on LE or something idk).
I’m not switching, still, I’m asking.
I’m superhappy with CE, and astounded as well by the continued incredible support, haven’t said otherwise in any way! It’s just a choice there is for us users, just a question.
Here is a link though to a specific n2+ image: LibreELEC Amlogic - LibreELECODROID N2/N2+LibreELEC-AMLGX.aarch64-12.0.1-odroid-n2.img.gz
I have no idea about cars so I don’t know what this means
The difference is that LE was primarily developed for the Raspberry Pi and CE for Amlogic chips.
If you use a Raspberry Pi, you can use LE, which would be a solid choice.
Using LE on an Amlogic chip will not bring you joy. (only if ALL your material is H264 1080p, than maybe) Or to put it another way, no, LE is not an alternative to CE
As an example: Emuelec is based on CE
No, it’s much more limited! If you happy with CE, just stay with it.
Even oDroid/Hard Kernel themselves recommend CoreElec. The amount of work that has went into CoreElec support for N2+ is very high. I have to update it manually when there is a new major version. I was on 20.5, now I installed the latest 21 version (21.1.1) simply because I want continuous support. I have now connected my N2+ with CoreElec to an OLED and boy, does it look beautiful. Experience was good before, but now it is even better (considering the OLED).
Libreelec uses mainline linux kernel, where as CE uses AML kernel. It may superficially seem that using a more up to date mainline kernel would bring advantages - but it doesn’t except in a few minor cases (such as WIFI dongle support).
This is because Linux mainline focuses on core hardware support which is shared across many ARM platforms. What it is poor at is supporting the specialist AMLogic hardware such as hardware decoding of video codecs. If you haven’t got this in your kernel you needd to rely on software decoding which will push the precious CPU cores hard and leave little resources for all the background tasks that Kodi runs.
The result will be suboptimal video and laggy freezing interface. Give it a go and report back, but last time I tried it the performance was very poor. Things may have improved, but I have my doubts because LE tends not to put much time into kernel tweaking or actual hardware reverse engineering. I for one would be genuinely interested to see if they have managed to get a usable experience on AML that proves my assumptions wrong.
a user on kodi forums posted about the Pi 2GB and said the benefits is it’s using mainline kernel which meant you can run the latest kodi on the even the Pi, I found the argument at clutching for straws. you won’t have a good experience running on Pi1. He said they have support for like 10 years. I said CoreELEC support their devices for like decades also.
the funniest thing is, it costs like $140 all in. I told him you can buy an AM6B+ for that price https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=378529
The fact of the matter is CoreELEC has targeted the Odroid N2(+) for 6 years. LE has worked on old Amlogic hardware for about a year. while still putting efforts on all their other platfroms. It’s simple maths. 1 year on generic old hardware with 10% effort , compared to 6 years with 100% effort on the actual hardware. a ratio of 1:60
plus I can’t say anything about LB team, but from what I seen CoreELEC team is as good as it gets.
It might sound like it’s a competition but it really isn’t. CoreELEC is the gold standard of Kodi. this is objectively true if you want the best quality image and features.
But it won’t take you long to try it. give it a go and report back.