rPi5 or rk3399?

vladimir · January 22, 2024 at 10:54 PM

I did get rid of the netflix and YT premium and I'm looking best player out there right now

I guess simillar to Anything better than a Pi4 currently? - Hardware - LibreELEC Forum

I would like:

sponsor block
youtube 4k
plays as much as possible from the "scene stuff"
no SD card os
can do CEC
4k UI
follow media refresh rate for movies

So I ended up with deciding between rPi5 and rk3399 players. This rk3399 does have official libreelec build https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005115649141.html and does have emmc. So should be nice options.

It seems rk3399 can do vp9 for 4k youtube. Are there any advantages for choosing rPi over this? Can it play more stuff then rk3399? Maybe there are still issues with refresh rate switching?

Also any advantage for going amlogic sbc (not a box!) and core elec? Maybe they do some more relevance, license "questionable" stuff?

I do also have 8gen NUC in the drawer - is there a chance to get it working with CEC for everything? It does have some options for waking up on cec in bios, but cannot do control out of box, so would putting pulse eight into JUST WORK? Can such an old Intel cpu just play everything?
It does have typical windows PC issues of not always waking up, etc. But maybe it is just windows and not x86 and with libre elec it would work?

**chewitt** · January 23, 2024 at 11:02 AM

Older NUCs only support CEC wake; hence the other options are missing. It does HEVC/H264 so should be generally useable, though not sure about VP9. Adding CEC can be done with the Pulse8 adapter if they still exist or can be found at a reasonable price. I'd also look at learning remotes that replace the stock TV remote (nb: these days most TV remotes can learn too).

LE support for Rockchip hardware is mostly aimed at SBC boards. There is an image for a "Hugsun X99 box" but I wouldn't assume that anything found on Aliexpress is 100% the same (there are lots of clones) so it might work, or it might not. Rockchip support mostly depends on upstream activity too. RPi5 is lacking native emmc (although add-on HATs are appearing for that now) and VP9 but is the gold standard for LE software support, and it seems to handle 4K/VP9 up-to 30fps (not 59.94) in software fine. At the current time 4K GUI is not recommended on ARM boards (and most Intel H/W) even the HDMI output is technically capable as all Kodi skins are 1080p and the TV almost always does a better job of upscaling 1080p to 4K than Kodi does (Kodi needs to do it in software and this will noticeably slow down the GUI. CE probably has options but their approach to open-source software seems to involve not-always providing sources and deliberately using pre-compiled blobs; most users don't care, some find that distasteful and look for something else. I don't run it so cannot recommend it.