Newbie - Best Libre project board for 4K HDR and Audio Passthrough

    Hi All,

    Can you guys please suggest me a good libre project for my use case.

    My main usage is playing 4K HDR blu ray rips that allows Audio passthrough. I should be able to passthrough Dolby Tru HD and Dolby Atmos.

    Is it possible with Libre Elec? I started searching for boards available and found following options.

    1. Libre Computer Board ROC-RK3328-CC

    2. Libre Computer Board AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato)

    Which one is better from these two? I am more inclined towards Rockchip as its better on paper. Any other option you guys suggest?

    Also for Rockchip should I get 2 GB version or 4 GB version?

    Thanks,

    Simar

    afaik audio passthrough has been working on all builds for a while now.

    as for choice of board the Raspberry Pi4 is likely to have the best overall community support and quality.

    but imho the Orange Pi 3 LTS is much cheaper and will provide the same performance as any of those boards. but then again I'm biased because i have several OP3s, and the more other people I can convince to buy them the more likely it will receive long term libreelec support 8)

    Raspberry Pi (4) is not libre. https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

    The person asked for a Libre board.

    The mainline-support for RK3588 is in development (is really far at the moment). No LibreELEC releases for RK3588 at the moment.

    There is also no LibreELEC release for the VisionFive 2 board or any other RISC-V boards.

    You can get cheap used RK3399 based boards that are supported from the list of boards here: https://libreelec.tv/downloads/rockchip/

    RK3399 is out for years and so you should have few used boards in your local market available.

    In case of freedom/libre you can in general take this from best possible to not that good.

    Here a list from good to not that good in case of libre:

    RISC-V (best) - NXP - Rockchip - Amlogic

    Dont buy: Broadcom (Raspberry), Allwinner (terrible company with GPL-Violations), Samsung Exynos


    Practical recommendations for LE: Any Rockchip RK3399 board. If you want a model named, than take the PINE64 RockPro64. If you need the most possible speed at supported boards, than take a Odroid N2+ (Amlogic) or a khadas VIM3 (both based on Amlogic A311D ).

    Raspberry Pi has some closed-source broadcom boot firmware which some folk get upset or uptight about, but unlike Rockchip who pay lip-service to upstream support and still have closed-source blobs and NXP who hide their entire ecosystem behind an NDA/paywall they openly provide A1+ support for their boards and the software ecosystem around them (both the open and closed-source bits). Pi devs have also been funding a lot of upstream development for their hardware too; because their own resources are limited and time-to-market counts so major things like mesa have been subcontracted to people with the knowledge and expertise.

    NB: LE has fairly terrible software support for all the (now dated) Amlogic boards you mentioned. Rockchip support is reasonable. Allwinner is the best of the three. RPi4 still wins the best supported board medal though.