This AV1 conversation enticed me to do some testing. I converted an HEVC file into Av1. The result was a 4K AV1 file with a 10mbps bitrate. It played fine on the 8i7BEH NUC with one logical processor hitting 25-25% CPU and the rest remaining under 10%. I confirmed that HW decoding was not being used and all playback was using SW decoding. The temperature remained around 90 degrees F.
I am pleased with the results.
Jeff
Interestingly that I went in and checked and under LibreElec HW acceleration for this NUC it has the option to enable AV1 hardware acceleration via VAAPI. So maybe a question is whether VAAPI detects the underlying capabilities and presents them as option or is it left up to the user to know which HW acceleration options presented are supported by the hardware or does VAAPI provide an abstraction layer of sorts allowing it to decode things not specific to the hardware ?
Maybe the LibreElec team can lean in here on this question ?
Thanks,
Jeff
Very nice and tidy.
I considered the NUC platform for my HTPC, with a nice case ... but leaned into Jank-mode insteadI fixed a bare Odroid H4 to the VESA mount on the rear of my TV. It has a 90mm Noctua fan zip-tied to the heatsink, but tbh it's barely needed - rarely even spins up and is inaudible even with my ear right next to it.
The main reason for going this route was the more modern codec h/w support of the Alder Lake based N300, specifically AV1.
LAN is the onboard 2.5gb ethernet, Bluetooth is a USB dongle, IR from an ancient USB MCE compatible thing. DDR5 memory & NVME storage.
If you ever find the NUC's, now very out of date, i7-8559U being a problem I heartily recommend the Odroid x86 boards - they are so tiny I'm sure you'd have no problem getting one to work in your nice case setup.
This build has been my toy and me trying to breathe more life into this NUC board. I've got a Beelink SER6 based upon an AMD Ryzen 5 6600H CPU that will run circles around the NUC i7 (with regards to CPU horsepower) and does AV1 in hardware. In fact I have a wide variety of endpoints. I running 10-15 clients of my Mezzmo server at any given time with different versions of LibreElec and Kodi all staying in sync..
For me I don't do anything with AV1 right now. I've done testing with this NUC by disabling HW acceleration and running full bitrate 4K UHD HEVC through it. It handles it fine, CPU remains low and it doesn't get warm with this case. That is one advantage of the i7 over an i3 or i5 in that it seems to be able to handle things in software, if needed, and the massive heatsink case keeps things cool. I wasn't expecting this benefit. I may try some AV1 files and see how it does with software only playback.
Thanks,
Jeff
"a bit larger" 🤣
Yeah, these cases go overboard on heat dissipation but they make up for it in looking cool. 
I don't like that the cases only work with a single model of NUC but this was a toy approach for me vs. a least expensive.
Jeff
For a few years I've been on a quest to build a high performance HTPC (Home Theater PC) that was totally quiet and would support all major video codecs with hardware decoding. At long last I've achieved my goal. This HTPC is a combination of parts from an Intel NUC 8i7BEH, a fanless Akasa Plato X8 case, a FLIRC USB infrared receiver and a Nipeal external antenna kit from Amazon.
This HPTC runs LibreElec, leveraging the Mezzmo Kodi addon I author with content being streamed from my Mezzmo server with 25K+ of media items. Performance and codec support are great, as well as stability. Almost all of my newer media is high bitrate H265 4K with HDR10. Dolby Vision isn't supported but I am not focused on that and feel it adds a layer of complexity. If LibreElec ever supports DV it will come along for the ride. It certainly isn't the cheapest HTPC available but I would contend one of the best performing with an internal SSD, running on Linux with an x86 processor makes all functions extremely snappy and the system overall very stable.
The Akasa case is great, albeit a bit larger than I expected. It is a solid chunk of aluminum weighing over 1.5 kilograms. The cooling capacity of the case is better than I expected and better than the original NUC case with a fan. With the original NUC case setup the idle temperature was often around 100 F degrees and could hit over 130 F degrees which kicked in the fan noise. With the new Akasa case the idle temperature is around 83 F degrees and around 100 F degrees during high bitrate playback, even with MPEG2 files which I am not using HW decoding. Many times it remains under 90 degrees during playback. The external antennas perform far better than the stock NUC setup. I can see my neighbor's WiFi SSIDs from over 100 ft away with a moderate signal level.
The overall assembly process was very easy and the Akasa case has room for a 2.5" SATA drive, in addition to the M.2 2280 slot on the NUC motherboard.
Thanks,
Jeff
I wanted to take a minute and provide some updates here on Hyper-V and virtualized Libreelec instances. From my testing I was able to get a Windows Hyper-V guest working with Vmworkstation running in the guest machine (i.e. basically nested hypervisors) with Libreelec virtual machines running under VMworkstation. I wasn't expecting great performance but just looking for functionality. In the end I could not get the Libreelec OVAs to run due to a lack of graphics card pass-through from the host through the Hyper-V hypervisor. Supposedly Hyper-V can do this via GPU partitioning but I ran out of energy to figure this out and the overall complexity of maintaining nested hypervisors wasn't exciting me.
So I went down another route of running Hyper-V along side of VMworkstation on the same host. It's a much simpler approach and with Hyper-V being a Type 1 hypervisor and VMworkstation being a Type 2, it should work. At first it wouldn't work until I found out that I needed to enable a Windows feature called "virtual machine hosting." This adds hypervisor extensions to support Type 1 and Type 2 running together. Once I enabled this feature Vmworkstation fired right up next to Hyper-V and the Libreelec OVAs came right up with full graphics and everything.
So now I have the Hyper-V machines running as my main machines (after converting over my old VMware VMs to Hyper-V VMs) and I am running Vmworkstation just to handle the Libreelec testing VMs. I am surprised so far with performance and stability of them both running at the same time. The Libreelec OVAs are a little slower than when Hyper-V wasn't enabled on the host machine but the performance is reasonable, especially for development testing.
Thanks,
Jeff
I can't recall the last time anyone on staff talked about using the Virtual image for development purposes, so I'm highly confident there have been zero thoughts about Hyper-V support. If people did want to run an image on something non-vmware the go-to these days would probably be Oracle Virtualbox since it's $free, already works, and doesn't require Windows. On the server side Proxmox seems to be what people are using.
Well I understand your perspective and I have some friends running Proxmox servers as they moved away from ESX and similar. I've got large machines running Windows with over 1PB of RAID and other hardware which runs great on Windows 11 Pro as hosts. Converting everything to Proxmox would be quite an undertaking. A move from VMworkstation to Hyper-V makes sense for me and is actually less costly since no more VMware licenses and I already own Windows Pro with Hype-V support. I think there is more Hyper-V out there than most folks realize, including most Fortune 100 companies run it extensively. I've worked for a few of them.
Anyway, if you change your mind, I'd be happy to test. I don't think it would be a heavy lift to add the libraries for Hyper-V but that's easy for me to say, since I wouldn't be doing it. The fact that Ubuntu and Slackware support it already (I presume Debian does too, I've just never tested yet) lead me to believe that it isn't a major uplift.
I may try keeping one VMworkstation machine running and be able to switch back and forth for testing. I'll give a shot at nested virtualization and load VMworkstation on a Windows 10 Guest VM under Hyper-V. Supposedly nested virtualization will work but I suspect I'll run into video driver issues for Kodi at that point. We'll see.
Thanks,
Jeff
I realize this thread is a bit old but was wondering whether any more thought has been given to add support for Hyper-V virtual environments given the purchase of VMware by Broadcom and their apparent reduced interest in supporting the end user community ?
I am doing a lot of testing right now to move all of my VMs away from VMworkstation to Hyper-V. Of course I always have the option of running Kodi under a Windows guest VM but would prefer to get to a native LibreElec solution. I was able to get Ubuntu and Slackware Linux running under Hyper-V so driver and kernel support is available.
Thanks,
Jeff
Display MoreAnother update:
Did NOT work on intel nuc11paki5 & intel nuc11pahi5 with iris xe. Bummer!
The only thing close I've got is no adapter or the cable matterones. I've yet to try direct display port. But I'm not confident.
Got a big box of amazon returns today. fuuuuu..
.......FYI if you are determined to run linux and kodi/variant and use HD audio and intel I think I read that 13th Gen NUCs work without issue if you're prepared to sell/launch your existing batch and splash out yet again. They're only about $1kaud each.
</complain>
Comments are my own and could/probably be wrong. Feel free to correct them.
Or you can spend 1/3rd of that on an AMD mini-PC and be done with the issue. I went the Beelink route but there are others. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to go the Intel route. I have 4 NUCs. I now use them for other things.
Thanks,
Jeff
I’m having the same issue with audio dropouts on my Intel NUC 12 Pro.
When I used it with Windows 10, the audio worked perfectly, although I sometimes experienced minor video dropouts when starting or stopping a movie.
I’m running the latest official LibreELEC version, and my receiver is a Pioneer SC-LX801.
I tried the 10-bit fix mentioned here, and it seems to have solved the problem for now.
The question is whether it's poor Intel hardware or bad drivers?
It worked without audio dropouts on Windows, but since our family has completely switched from Windows to Linux some time ago, we’re not interested in changing operating systems again.
It's an Intel driver issue. I switched from Intel NUCs to AMD min-PCs and my problems went away. Happily running LibreElec on AMD. I waited a few years to see if the problem went away. You can also not use passthrough audio and the problem should disappear on your NUC.
Thanks,
Jeff
So I have an update here. I upgraded the hardware for this Windows machine running VMWorkstation 17.5 . The new motherboard and CPU support AMD ATI Radeon via a Ryzen 7 9800 X3D. I loaded the latest ATI drivers and had to enable 3D video for each LibreElec OVA but now all of them are working from back as far as 9.2.6 to current. It looks like my older ATI Radeon card didn't have new enough DX support for VMware.
Jeff
Oh well. Intel could at least point us which AVR it used for testing (if any). At the very least it would serve as a starting point for us to begin bothering Denon/Marantz about it.
I went to an AMD box from an Intel box and problem solved. It wasn't my preferred approach but I got tired of waiting. The Intel boxes I have (NUC 8i7BEH and N100) both work fine with my Yamaha AVR as long as I don't use passthrough audio.
Jeff
Any ideas?
Here's the thread regarding the N100 issues with certain AVRs. I ended up going with an AMD SER6 box and couldn't be happier.
Thanks,
Jeff
I get the same thing with a beelink n100 and a Marantz receiver. Works fine with a DP to hdmi adapter, but not with straight hdmi. Tried different cables and various settings.
Unfortunately my N100 doesn't have a display port where I can test this. It just has 2 HDMI ports.
Thanks,
Jeff
Long story short: There is some sort of hardware audio bug with NUC11 devices and LibreELEC, which causes the audio driver to break until I reboot the machine. Very frustrated with it, and not able to solve it (check my post history..)
Currently using the Intel NUC11PAHi3, and I want to get a new NUC or similar with which I can simply move the SATA SSD and not have to set up everything again like a fresh install. Potentially like the ASUS RNUC13ANKI30000UI for instance
Is LibreELEC picky about booting on similar x86 hardware? Anything I need to know?
Good luck on whether the ASUS NUC will resolve your audio dropout issue. See my response on this thread. I've given up on the Intel platform for now and bought a Beelink with AMD. So far it's been rock solid and no dropouts.
Thanks,
Jeff
Display MoreI also use a Denon receiver and have the issue.
I did find an interesting thread on the Kodi forum where they found the same (or at least very similar) issue, and think it's an issue with the audio clocks in that mode causing issues:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=372242&page=3
They made this ticket for intel: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/8276
Sounds very close to what we're experiencing.
And after reading their thread, if taking the Denon receiver out of the equation solves the ticket, we should also test a non intel source on the denon to see if the issue persists. Because if other devices can perfectly play 4k hdr 24p through the Denon receiver, and only with intel we get the audio dropouts, it's some incompatibility between intel & Denon that coulds still have the root cause at either side.
I've been watching this thread for a long time and have had an Intel NUC (8i7BEK) and a newer N100 working with a Yamaha RX-A3080 AVR. Both Intel platforms have the same audio dropout issues with Dolby Atmos and other bitstream audio sources. I've been living with this issue on Intel for a few years.
I recently switched to a Beelink SER6 platform with an AMD processor and GPU. So far no dropouts with my Yamaha AVR. I realize it's way overkill but it's also lightning fast and no more dropouts. Prior to the Beelink SER6 I had tried a Raspberry Pi 5 for a few months with my AVR and no dropouts either. All running prior and the latest versions of LibreELEC.
I even tried OSMC and the Vero 4K+ and Vero V with no dropouts. Only LibreELEC with the Intel platforms have dropouts in my setup. I've not tried running Windows / Kodi on any of the Intel; mini-PCs.
Thanks,
Jeff
.
Thank you so much for LibrELEC 12.0.1 which has Kodi 12.1 and has the fix for the stereo upmix issue. I can confirm that I have my left front speaker back now when using stereo upmix with 2ch audio sources on an N100 box.
Jeff
You can use an internal SSD with a Raspberry Pi 5. Here's a picture of my test unit. SSDs do increase the price of the Raspberry Pi 5 to where an N100 box is close in overall cost and performance.
Jeff
