Time to Switch from CuBox i4 pro to RPi3?

1st Official Post

    Hi guys,

    I have been having some buffering problems on my cuBox, sometimes the video freezes totally, sometimes stutter all through the movie (ranging from unbearable to just irritating), sometimes short "buffer breaks" for the Cubox (i4 pro). It's been the same with all LE (including vPeters builds) and OE releases up until 8.0.1 / and to no surprise significantly worse when i accidentally started to scan my audio library in the background :D

    Anyway - what are your thoughts of RPi 3 being an upgrade to CuBox? Its about 4 years since i switch ed form original RPi to Cubox and maybe I should switch back, seeing how the Raspberry hardware is evolving and Cubox standing still. My main issue then was that the PIs audio output was awful and that the USB ports had trouble keeping an stable dataflow (or what it is called) so that using the RPi as a HD audio player was out of the question. I have a top USB DAC now that work flawlessly with my Kodi setup on the Cubox, so if Raspberry got past those early troubles it might be time for me to switch again?

    Any comments here? I cant find much about Raspberry Pi 3 as a Audio player, apart from those using an I2S DAC like HiFiberry, and/or Volumino, but that is not the way I intend to go.

    /Stefan

    • Official Post

    Raspberry Pi hardware is not the fastest out there, and it doesn't play every codec out there, but no other hardware receives anything close to the A1++ support and attention to detail that we see from the Pi Foundation staff to ensure Kodi runs great. The on-board audio is nothing special but there are a huge number of i2s DACs available, and there's no reason why the USB device you already have shouldn't be usable.

    Quote from chewitt


    Raspberry Pi hardware is not the fastest out there, and it doesn't play every codec out there, but no other hardware receives anything close to the A1++ support and attention to detail that we see from the Pi Foundation staff to ensure Kodi runs great. The on-board audio is nothing special but there are a huge number of i2s DACs available, and there's no reason why the USB device you already have shouldn't be usable.

    Thanks Chewitt, it is exactly the support and volume of Raspberry users (General/Kodi/Volumino) that makes me want to go back that road. Since my current DACs USB interface (Also open source (Audio Widget)) work with no extra tweaking on CuBox I don't see why It should not work Raspberry if the first versions USB ethernet congestion problems are cleared out. And I cant see why it should be an issue now, when RPi is on No 3 and 4 years later.

    -Stefan.