What is Today's "Flagship" LibreElec Hardware?

...or are they just a series of tradeoffs?

Conventional wisdom is that x86 has the raw power to keep the interface and everything else running smoothly, but unless you have a Gemini Lake or Gemini Lake refresh, that means no HEVC 10bit HDR due to the limitations of older HDMI standards.

Some ARM boxes and systems on boards have HEVC 10bit HDR recording, but it is difficult to keep up on what is actually working, and what is temporarily broken and decoding in software. (which seems to be a lot of Amlogic stuff temporarily due to moving to new kernels) I don't know how people keep up.

If everything in it were decoding properly (not sure if it is) the Odroid N2+ looks like it would be pretty awesome. Quite a powerful ARM chip with HEVC and HDR decoding support (once implemented)

Then there are the little Gemini Lake x86 boxes. They may be small Atom based cores, not the big Core cores, but they do have more advanced decoding.

Big X86 cores can probably brute force most things, but then we are talking heat and fan noise...

If you were shopping for a LibreElec box today, and wanted the best possible experience, price - within reason - not being a limiting factor, what would YOUR choice be?

Quote from Nicolas

Odroid H2+ was also on my list but at the Moment the NIC isn't supported in mainline Kernel. Should be there with Kernel 5.9.

Ugh. I wonder how far behind the latest mainline kernel the LibreElec project is?

I don't understand why they did this. It would have been a much better device with a Gigbit Intel NIC, than 2.5Gigabit Realtek junk.

I'll take the more reliable Intel NIC's any day of the week. I don't even know why the industry bothered with releasing 2.5 and 5Gigbit standards, when real 10Gig ethernet has been around for over a decade and should be able to make a cost effective jump to consumer. There is no need for anything in between.

Usually I just don't buy boards with Realtek NIC's because it doesn't matter which Realtek chip you have, they are all utter garbage.

If this little board had dual Intel NIC's it would open the doors for it to be used in so many more applications. It could even make for a great little pfSense box.

I understand Realtek is probably cheaper, but how much does it save? $2 per port? I'd happily pay that to get Intel NIC's.

Quote from Shoog

The N2+ works really well on Coreelec at the moment, runs quiet and is reliable. At some point in the future you can migrate to Mainline builds on the N2+ (not yet though). It offers the best price to performance ratio of any product at the moment. It runs quietly and handles just about any media you can throw at it. You could expect to pay 3-4x the price for anything x86 based that can do the same and it would cost you more in energy in the long run.
X86 make better media servers, but ARM rules in the field of media players at the moment, and Odroid rule that field by a large margin.
Libreelec follow Mainline development on ARM very closely - but its not mature enough to be a daily driver yet.

Shoog

So, what is CoreElec anyway? Just a fork of LibreElec focused on getting all the Amlogic features working?

Quote from Shoog

Exactly.

Ah,

Is the relationship between the two projects good and collaborative, or are there hurt feelings? Often when projects split there is some level of animosity. I don't know if I am walking into a minefield :p