Best Chipset for Libreelec

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    S912 is disqualified for having no proper Linux drivers (forcing use of Android drivers in a compatibility fudge). S905X is technically the best chipset, but all boxes are crippled with 100-BaseT Ethernet. S905 is thus the best real-world option as it has 95% of S905X features and 1000-BaseT Ethernet on most (not all, but most) boxes. If you purchase a $cheap box from various far-east websites expect a more complex install process, zero support from the vendors, lower quality internal chip choices, and frequently shitty firmware and manufacturing practices. Caveat emptor..

    Quote from chewitt

    ..., and frequently shitty firmware ...

    That is definitely a big issue, especially if you meant the stock Android firmware. TBH, I rather have shitty firmware than shitty hardware. My MXQ Pro S905 still has a shitty stock Android firmware in its eMMC storage, but it runs very well with LE 8.0.x as of this writing on an external storage. So, a shitty firmware is not an issue for me, YMMV.

    Is 100 or 1000-BaseT Ethernet matter if your internet speed is less than 100mb up/down? Personally, I like Pi3 if your intention is only for kodi. 4K doesn't matter to me.

    It matters if you are serving media from local network shares/devices, but only if your router and those devices have Gigabit LAN. IRL it will be rare at the moment that you will have any media that would saturate a 100Mbs connection, unless you are doing multiple things at the same time over that bandwidth.

    thats true i enjoy watching x265 with dts.

    Its better to buy some of these cheap plastic s905 boxes than rasperry's if you want a smooth playback .

    Why resort to tricks to make a Pi3 work with HEVC "pretty well" when you can get an Ordroid C2 or a Wetek and have everything working out-of-the box?

    Unless there is a big difference in picture quality, I see no reason to get a Pi now.

    Quote from Klojum

    New tricks are helping the Raspberry Pi's 2 and 3 play 1080p HEVC videos pretty well with the latest releases.

    A moderate overclock will help as well.

    Unfortunately this is limited to 8-Bit HEVC, which is utterly useless.
    You cannot get AVC quality with HEVC if you are limited to 8-Bit encoding, at least not while maintaining a filesize advantage.
    HEVC needs 10-Bit for proper picture quality.
    And yes, that goes for 8-Bit sources too.

    Even a very high quality x265-8 preset (like CRF17 / medium / tune grain) will introduce some ugly banding lines on smooth color gradations, whereas x264-8 would not only look better at CRF17 / medium / tune film - it would also result in a very similar filesize and encoding is much faster.

    x265-10 however looks better than both and is smaller than both.
    This is one of the reasons why proper 10-Bit output (or at least proper 10-Bit to 8-Bit conversion) is so important.


    S905(X) have an obvious advantage over any RPi in that regard.
    Also, RPi's are limited by SD cards as their only source for the OS.
    Any S905(X) internal memory is much faster than the best SD card in a Pi (considering the RPi's USB2-based controller).