Hardware to Run LibreELEC?

1st Official Post

    hello, i am looking at purchasing something that i can install LibreELEC on for a friend of mine. not to expensive but something that will run solid, something that will do a direct boot to LibreELEC. suggestions, options, model #'s would be great!.

    Thanks

    Edited once, last by LilSnoop40 (September 8, 2016 at 1:53 PM).

    Raspberry Pi is good for your own use. Not so good if you are building a system for someone else. They will constantly be bugging you to come fix it.

    If you really must choose Raspberry Pi, I would help your friend build it, rather than build it for him. That way he will learn how to image a card, stuff not to do (unsafe shutdown etc).

    Quote from trent


    and this is what i thought as well, i used to use the firestick as it was easy for people with the remote. is there anything like that as far as comes with a remote and i could load LibreELEC on it?

    Thanks

    Raspberry Pi is good for your own use. Not so good if you are building a system for someone else. They will constantly be bugging you to come fix it.

    If you really must choose Raspberry Pi, I would help your friend build it, rather than build it for him. That way he will learn how to image a card, stuff not to do (unsafe shutdown etc).

    • Official Post
    Quote from trent


    They will constantly be bugging you to come fix it.

    I don't know what you are doing to a RPi box to make it crash or whatever, but I don't have those experiences. Not in the last couple of years using Raspberry Pi's, or now during the testing of the next LibreELEC alpha/beta/stable builds. Things work fine with the official addons. If you are planning to also add the 'not so legal' addons, then yes you are on your own.

    Should the bugs come from things that got altered, deleted or damaged by the user, then that's too bad. There is no real fix for stupidity. Make yourself an all-working setup on the micro sdcard, and then make a full backup of it. And if there is a problem, restore the backup.

    • Official Post

    You can get decent Pi starter kits from people like The Pi Hut. The kit will ship with a "noobs" SD card that might contain OpenELEC as the pre-loaded mediacentre OS unless they finally exhausted the stock of OE imaged cards, but 30 seconds with our USB-SD creator app will correct that

    Other sources of kits are pimoroni.com and modmypi.com .. and since yesterday the official Raspberry Pi - Teach, Learn, and Make with Raspberry Pi shop although that kit has stuff you don't need for a mediacentre and is more expensive. Still, all of them kick back a percentage to the Pi foundation and it's a great cause.

    Quote from Klojum

    I don't know what you are doing to a RPi box to make it crash or whatever, but I don't have those experiences. Not in the last couple of years using Raspberry Pi's, or now during the testing of the next LibreELEC alpha/beta/stable builds. Things work fine with the official addons. If you are planning to also add the 'not so legal' addons, then yes you are on your own.

    Should the bugs come from things that got altered, deleted or damaged by the user, then that's too bad. There is no real fix for stupidity. Make yourself an all-working setup on the micro sdcard, and then make a full backup of it. And if there is a problem, restore the backup.

    Your experiences are not reflective of the OPs scenario because you are technically knowledgeable and by your own admission have been using/testing Raspberry Pi for years. You also presumably re-image your SD card on a semi-regular basis which masks of a lot of the corruption problems.

    Remember that OP is not asking for a system for himself, he is asking to build it for someone else. If they cannot buy/build their own system, their technical expertise is probably not very high.

    RPi is simply not a good choice for this scenario. It is not a stable consumer-oriented product. It is very prone to SD corruption. It doesn't even have a power button. If you build one for a non-techy person, it will crash/freeze eventually (Kodi cannot be called stable in the modern sense), they won't know how to safely reboot, they'll pull power, after they do this several times the SD card will corrupt, they'll call you to come fix it. What starts as a fun favor to someone will quickly turn into a hassle...

    That's why I suggest to use something more stable, OR if you must choose R Pi, help them rather than just do everything for them and present them with a working system. This way they will learn the process to set it up and take responsibility for it's operation themselves.

    I am speaking from experience of being the 'tech guy' for family and friends. What starts as a favor soon turns into an obligation or expectation, they just expect you to come over and fix stuff. how-can-i-get-out-of-being-my-familys-tech-repair-guy-or-girl

    Edited once, last by trent (September 11, 2016 at 5:09 PM).

    I think you should be a little careful of the comment you just made re Kodi

    it will crash/freeze eventually (Kodi cannot be called stable in the modern sense)

    The HARDWARE here is the issue, NOT Kodi.

    OE, LE and Kodi are all VERY stable. (staying away from nightly and dev builds)

    But I do agree with you as regards the pi, I have a number of machines and if I were to put one out like requested, I would stump up the money and get an Intel NUC, for me they just work.

    Hello,

    Could you tell us more about your friend and how do he think he will use his Kodi box?

    Without knowing that it will be a bit hard to tell you what is the best.

    For exemple here is just a small detail but for some will be a big problem. Do your friend want to use a webbrower in kodi? (for exemple just to go on internet or to use some streaming services?)

    If not a raspberry pi 3 would be the way to go (because actually their is no web browser for kodi on rpi). but be carefull the rpi3 is well known to suffer from hight temperature (>80°c) so you'll need some heat sink and for a kodi box an active one woth a small fan plugged on the GPIO port. Because when hot the rpi will throttle really really bad.

    If you're not ready to do that I'll go for the second solution. Witch can have a web browser in kodi.

    Any miniPC solution will be good they can be cheap or exensive the model is your choice.

    For exemple :

    ZBOX BI322 with Windows 10 Home | ZOTAC
    Cubi.html.html#hero-overview
    Bleujour - a new idea of IT - BLEUJOUR

    Quote from DerpFox


    but be carefull the rpi3 is well known to suffer from hight temperature (>80°c) so you'll need some heat sink and for a kodi box an active one woth a small fan plugged on the GPIO port. Because when hot the rpi will throttle really really bad.

    No need for noisy active cooling. Just get this case: The Official Kodi Edition Raspberry Pi Case | Kodi | Open Source Home Theater Software it's nice and provides ample cooling, even when messing with HEVC (on hardware supported codecs the PI3 doesn't get hot).

    Quote from Grimson

    No need for noisy active cooling. Just get this case: The Official Kodi Edition Raspberry Pi Case | Kodi | Open Source Home Theater Software it's nice and provides ample cooling, even when messing with HEVC (on hardware supported codecs the PI3 doesn't get hot).

    Also that case is nice but is not sold every where.

    active cooling is not necesarly noisy. If you take a small fan (3*3cm) just to make ar flow in the case everything will be good. My blueray disk player have such fan and I never heard it.

    Also that case is nice but is not sold everywhere.

    Edited once, last by DerpFox (September 12, 2016 at 6:43 AM).

    Quote from silashack


    I think you should be a little careful of the comment you just made re Kodi

    it will crash/freeze eventually (Kodi cannot be called stable in the modern sense)

    The HARDWARE here is the issue, NOT Kodi.

    OE, LE and Kodi are all VERY stable. (staying away from nightly and dev builds)

    I am not bashing Kodi but there is nothing to be gained by exaggerating it's stability. If you use it for any length of time you will experience some crashes and freezes here and there.... we all know this and have experienced it.

    I am not saying this to bash Kodi, my point is that it will crash eventually and if we are building systems for family/friends, we need to consider the outcome of a crash. What will they do? Can they ssh in to reboot it? Probably not. Can they initiate a safe shut down? No, Pi has no power button. So probably they will pull the power cord.

    Then we need to consider that some hardware is more tolerant of sudden power loss. Raspberry Pi with very basic power regulation, booting from a low-grade TLC-flash SD card? I am afraid to say it will go corrupt pretty quickly. Then they will call you and say "hey, that Kodi box you built me....it seems to be 'broken' can you come and fix it?"

    Again, I am not saying don't do it, but if you must choose Pi for someone else then guide them through the process of setting it up rather than do it yourself and just give them a finished system.

    In my opinion I built a RPi3 Kodi system for my daughter and connected it to my tvheadend server and it has not been stable at all.
    If you do go down the Rpi3 route though do make sure you get a decent psu or the system will be very unstable.
    An Nvidia Shield is another decent option