Best Mini PC for Libreelec

    nice good evening


    First of all, I would like to describe the starting position:


    So I subscribed to Teleboy, which is a Swiss TV provider via the Internet, where, among other things, all standard TV channels are available in HD.

    I quickly realized that the Teleboy app is not the real egg.

    But since I'm already using Kodi to stream from my Emby server, I promptly tried the Teleboy addon and I really like it.

    First I had Kodi on my 7 year old Android TV, now on a Fire TV 4K Max Stick.


    Problem:

    Kodi runs much faster on the Fire TV Stick than on my Android TV. But every now and then there are freezes in Kodi, sometimes switching in the PVR addon works a bit slowly, too slow for me. But sometimes it switches quite quickly, I would be happy with that. But there are even more things that bother me about the Fire TV Stick, e.g. when you come out of standby, you always end up on the home screen of the stick, if you go into Kodi, the program continues from before, but stutters until you switch to another channel.


    What am I looking for now?

    I'm not looking for the jack of all trades, but for the perfect device for Kodi. I was already thinking about the Nvidia Shield, but according to my information Kodi does not have a developer from the Android segment. Therefore, Kodi will always have teething troubles on it. So now something without Android.

    I am now looking for an energy-saving mini PC on which I would like to install Libreelec. It should boot from standby fairly quickly. I just want to run all my TV and film experiences through Kodi, DAZN also has a great addon for it, even if it sometimes loads slowly, but the streams work great.

    In summary: energy-saving, short boot time, Kodi must run without errors or freezes, oh yes, the PC should be quiet, it is in my bedroom. I would then like to control with the Harmony FB, possibly with Bluetooth or Flirc.

    I've already looked at the NUCs, but there are also countless models.

    Then there are the Deskminis and I also like the Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny.

    But don't look all the way through the different CPUs and the volume that is then present. Buying used would be an option.


    Hope someone can share their own experience with me.


    Thank you and I wish you a nice evening

    RPi4 is not the master of all possible codecs and cannot standby, but it's the best-supported device we install on, supports all or enough of the codecs you actually need, and has low-enough power consumption that you can just leave it on all the time (even in current times). I can highly recommended a flirc case (no fans so completely silent) and flirc USB for handling remotes. It's my family daily-driver combination.

    I stopped trying to figure out NUC chip names and numbers about a decade ago so can't be much help on that front, but Any recent NUC without LSPCON should be reasonable and just work too.

    NB: Kodi has no official Android maintainer because nobody (sane) wants to own the entirety of Android support, but 95% of the team who run Kodi on Android (and many do) use an nVidia Shield, so when something breaks due to nVidia firmware updates (as nvidia provides updates, unlike many other Android devices) there are always people motivated to fix the problem.