Hi, bear with me – fairly new to this and looking for some advice.
First, my “wants” are 4K and HDR playback over ethernet and a generally a snappy box. Netflix, amazon etc I’ve got other ways.
I’m trying to decide between OSMC (Vera 4k+) and Coreelec, and the pros/cons of each. Particularly regarding support going forwards ie. with metadata handshaking for HDR etc.
Also, if going down the coreelec route I am trying to get to grips with the various kernals, drivers and challenges you folks are facing for the future. Looks like the main AMLogic options are s905x, s912 and a droid n2 with the new s922x (or even s905x2??).
Is development moving away from S912, and therefore best to avoid? Because of issues with libMali/using android. Is S922x seemingly the way forward? I don’t mind waiting till April to get a droid n2 if this is where the action will be going forward….I dont really know what people mean when “moving to mainline linux”, good or bad thing?!
Any input much appreciated.
Vera 4k+ is a commercial product, and it is supposed to have 5 year support guaranteed.
CoreELEC does not manufacture nor sell devices, so there are no guarantees about future support or updates.
I had used the N2 to watch several HDR movies and it works just fine with my LG TV. It’s still a work in progress for us, but it works pretty well already.
CE on Odroid N2 will use kernel 4.9, we will also move the older devices to this kernel so that we won’t have to support two different kernel versions.
Mainline is basically a bog standard Linux kernel, while the kernels we use in CE are vendor specific (provided by the SoC vendor, in this case Amlogic), and primarily aimed at Android. Mainline is good, as it aims to standardize everything, but it’s a huge challenge because many modules, including GPU drivers have to be developed from scratch by the open source community. So it’s still many months (maybe even years) away from being usable at the same level as the vendor specific kernels we have right now.
Development isn’t really moving away from the S912, but that SoC has always been a hack to get working and the S922X is superior in every way.
In my opinion the N2 is definitely the way to go. It’s a very fast platform, much faster than the S905X boxes I have compared it to.
Brilliant, thanks. I’ll grab a N2. If the coreelec team are so enthusiastic about it then thats a good sign to me!