Recommendation for the next av receiver

  • Hi community,

    everybody asks what pi to use for libreelec - I wanted to take a different approach.. :D
    As my next av receiver is up to enter my building I wanted to ask for some recommendations for best interoperability between libreelec on raspberry pi (doesn't matter if now on 4b or maybe 5).


    I just had a Onkyo TX-NR7100 at home and it's didn't work like my old Yamaha RX-V775.
    The screen didn't upscale to fullscreen... beside that I really had difficulties with the receiver with airplay and I was a little bit frustrated..

    Maybe I would have been happy in the end with configuration adjustments ... but because of some other inconvenciences I returned the av receiver.
    As I read now about ppl having problems with Denon X2800 X3800 models I was a little bit careful now in trying out the next model.

    Most of the content is 1080p that I watch, Dolby, DTS should be running without any issues...
    If the new combo would be capable to handle UHD content with Dolby Vision or HDR10+..

    The different audio streams should be send via passthrough to that av receiver.

    From what I understood from Chewitt is: RPi4 makes hardware decoding of H264 while the RPi5 sofware decodes it.
    But it decodes HEVC (h265) in hardware, correct?

    So if I would switch from RPi4 to RPi5 I would still be able to watch my old 1080p h264 content decoded in software and newer stuff in HEVC in UHD 3840 x 2160..
    No I don't have one of the newest tv and things like DV and HDR10+ are not yet in range for me to use.

    So getting back to my question..
    Is here anybody who could give me a suggestion of what would be a good replacement for my old Yamaha RX-V775?

    It should be in the range of 800-1200 euros at around rather than close to 2k :P

    I must confess I didn't look in the market of the newly developed tv / video streaming and display standards so I was a little bit overwhelmed by what is available regarding dolby atmos, dts:x, auro 3d, imax enhanced...
    And now I am little bit helpless :) but don't want to invest in something that will be not usefull soon.

    Best regards,
    Unixnode

  • I'm running a Marantz SR7011 since 2018 (was discounted as old stock when something new came out) and when that finally dies of old age sometime in the next decade I'll do the same again; find something Marantz in the upper mid-range of their lineup from the previous 18-months which had a great rating and is now on-sale somewhere. These days I'm only using 5.1 output (else there's too much cable everywhere) and I use PCM output in Kodi to avoid needing two remote controls. Perhaps it's old(er) age but these days I'm content to have something that sounds good (with Kef Reference speakers) that "just works" instead of pushing the boundaries of Linux media; or perhaps the boundaries (and an RPi5) just caught up with what I'm happy with and need?

    RPi5 has greatly improved CPU decode capabilities over an RPi4 so it can e.g. handle some AV1/VP9 content, but otherwise doesn't really add anything over an RPi4, e.g. HEVC capabilities are identical.

    HDR10+ is typically backwards compatible to HDR10 so you'll see "HDR" output on that content. DV content is sometimes backwards compatible with standard HDR and othertimes requires hardware with dedicated DV capabilities; which limits you to devices that run Android or Windows and are outside the scope of this forum.