I have 3 Odroid N2/N2+, 2 as daily drivers for CE and one is used exclusively for EmuELEC in their respective rooms.
After years of monkeying around with “best value” media players/space heaters, I’ll never go back. Especially seeing as how the current “best value” players are essentially a crap shoot regarding functionality with CE.
I think the point everyone is making is that the $50 device might work. If you’re willing to gamble $50 on the chance that it might work, might have the actual amount of ram it was advertised as having, and might have working wifi/Bluetooth/ETH - more the power to you.
Thanks, of course the more you spend the better it should be.
But that doesn’t mean that I need to buy a ferrari to get a nice car.
I have not had any problem with my cheapo T95. I paid 40 dollars at the time, and it is still working.
I can try a Xiaomi Mi Box S from Amazon, and if it does not work, I can return it. Costs 58 euros.
I think is way overpriced here in Europe the N2. It costs 58 dollars in USA IIRC. That is less than 50 euros. Here it costs double that. Makes no sense.
And then you have to add a power supply, a remote, and a case.
You just proved that you don’t know what you are talking about. The Xiaomi Mi Box has a locked bootloader and cannot run CE. This is the sort of mistake peoples kind advice is trying to save you from.
Maybe confusion starts because you do not clearly specify the usecase.
If you want to just run Kodi on Android, go with the cheapest box you could get.
If you want to run CE on such a box (and you asked in a CE forum!), you need a reliable & supported HW.
X96 was OK some times ago, but nowadays (due to IC allocations everywhere) it is jeopardy. There are several threads here with Fake RAM, unsupported variations of WIFI, and unknown CPU variants, all sold under the same name. This cannot be supported by CE team, variations & efforts are too high.
Therefore, you got recommendations to spend some more more $ to buy a known vendor.
First box was a mxq pro+ with 2gb ram and 100mbit Lan wit an s905x. Second an x96 mini with 2gb ram, 100mbit Lan and an s905w. And last year I bought a x96 max with 1000mbit Lan 4gb ram and an s905x3. All bought from geekbuying.com. All 3 boxes work without problems. Coreelec is installed on the emmc for all 3 boxes. The x96 mini was the cheapest for about €25
The fact that your 4 year old box has performed suitably for you until now, where it has developed a fault indicates that your uses are not required by bleeding edge technology.
So on the surface, a cheap box would normally work well enough with CE.
Unfortunately, we are not in normal times.
One of the downsides is that boxes with a certain name that would likely have presented little if no problems a couple of years ago are stating to see increases in incompatibility as well as fakes.
No doubt partly due to the chip shortages, meaning that Frankenstein like boxes are cobbled together with whatever is available to make a buck., hence hesitation in recommending anything that is not fully supported and has consistency of component manufacture.
If low price is a must then the second hand market might actually yield more success as older models may have greater quality and compatibility.
But to some extent, there is always gamble with what are essentially no name products. Even those with names recognisable to people on here will have little or no recognition at all in the wider world.
So one aspect of purchase for a cheap box (and perhaps even more so for an expensive one) would be to buy local and buy from a source where returns are easy.
Amazon and eBay do tend to be sites where there are protections available, so I would say spend some time to shop around and ask questions about what you might buy and what happens if it turns out not to bee suitable.
Trading can be a little like the wild wet right now, so caveat emptor is more appropriate than in more normal times of supply and demand.