After buying a x96 max plus, and unable to install coreelac I’ll be donating this to my brother and buying a new box.
Any recommendations for specific boxes and sellers, that are guaranteed to work with coreelac, and not have a locked bootloader making microsd booting impossible?
Video playback in corelac is more compatible than android/Kodi, ie on a few files I get audio but no video in android/Kodi, but the same files work fine with corelac kodi
N2 is the obvious go to, but also the Odroid C4, Khadas VIM3 and the VIM3L.
Of the cheap boxes the X96Air has worked for everyone who has tried it and it performs well.
The X96 Air is the one to buy. But get at least the 4/32 one. It has everything and everythings works nicely without any problems. Install to emmc also works without any issue.
I am very handy but wouldn’t go down the route of adding an optical port and the associated case modifications. The tone of the questioner suggestsnhe is even less handy.
First of all, sorry for another thread like this, I’m sure there are many. I will try to be as specific as I can.
My requirements -
will be connected via HDMI to receiver
need lossless audio passthru
good cooling
oem regular updates for firmware and support
known to be stable
good to have -
if firmware provided also enables audio passthru in Android
easy dual boot (e.g. as found in Ugoos)
I’m new to CoreElec and I’m having difficulty in understanding which to pick from the huge number of boxes all based on same SOC.
I have narrowed down to box based on S905X3 or S922X. Both seem to have same decoding capabilities. There also seem to be many variants of above as well as S905X4 etc which I don’t know if they are supported.
The other question I have is how to find which device is supported. The device tree doesn’t seem to have everything or I don’t know how to look.
But X88 Pro X3 is not listed on device tree page which only has X88 king. There is a thread on it (X88 PRO X3, Choose DTB and Install to EMMC) which says to use generic image but after reading the thread its still not clear if the device is supported or not?
I also looked for Transpeed as I considered this - www_amazon_com/Android-32GB-Streaming-Media-Player/dp/B0815T4B38, but again cannot find them in device tree page.
My questions -
is S905X3 vs S922X a big difference when using heavy skins and large libraries? Is the S922 much snappier in daily use? Is it worth the almost $80 premium?
does CE allow changing partition size to allocate more space to it, vs Android. e.g. most of these have 32GB RAM which can be used for addon, cache etc since I wont be using the Android partition much
who makes a reliable hardware with good cooling etc and support, besides Odroid, since its out of stock, plus after adding needed parts the cost works out same as other Android boxes
I am in US and prefer to buy from Amazon if possible due to better return policy and short shipping times. I know Aliexpress has much larger variety so I don’t mind that if needed.
can someone recommend a good choice for S905X3 based box (see many choices like X96, H96, Transpeed, X88 and many other brands its hard to tell if they are supported by CE) as well as S922X (Ugoos looks good to me but is close to $160 and not sold by Amazon), or anything else I should be looking at
Discard X88 Pro X3. It has an encrypted bootloader, so you cannot use bl_301 features and it detects only 2Gb of RAM in bootloader. I changed them in favour of H96
Your requirements will be met by purchasing a supported CE device.
Android support for Chinese branded boxes will be ZERO
Narrow your choice to the hardware below.
Khadas Vim3 or Vim3L
Odroid N2+ or the C4
Going to repeat this again - as far as I can see none of the Android boxes are adequately cooled - none. If you want to squeeze the maximum performance out them then this is an issue.
The only AMLogic devices which provide adequate cooling are the Odroids, the Khadas have pathetic cooling solutions which are totally unsuitable for a media player.
And for CE use there is no practical difference between the performance of the S905x3(running performance governor) and the S922.