Indeed a very attractive alternative.
Does the Beelink S12 Pro you mentioned has any kind of issues with HDR switching, framerate switching, or any BT 2020 color space weirdness? I'm about to pull the trigger but just wanted to be sure about the capabilities of the box.
I recently bought a similar mini pc, the TRIGKEY G4 N100, and it's working great at the moment. My setup is:
1. Old Samsung TV that supports 4K, HDMI 2.0b, HDR, HDR10+, but NOT Dolby Vision
2. Onkyo AV receiver
3. TRIGKEY G4 N100 w/ LibreElec 12 nightly
4. Running Kodi at 4k / 23.976 fps. Resolution switching is disabled. Frame rate switching is enabled w/ 4sec delay.
LibreElec 11 was working decently - frame rate & HDR switching did work. However some HDR files had washed out colors and I determined it was happening for files with dolby vision - plex reported the video as "4K DoVi/HDR10 (HEVC Main 10)".
Upgrading to the latest LibreElec 12 nightly fixed the washed out colors. I'm not certain what exact change fixed it, perhaps some combination of Kodi 21/ linux kernel / ffmpeg 6 improved HDR support.
For reference, I previously had a SHIELD PRO 2019 that loved to randomly freeze / crash when playing 4K files. This mini pc is so much more powerful / stable than the SHIELD. I suspect any Intel N100 based mini pc will work just as well as the TRIGKEY.