It's not sure it's possible to damage the CM1 unless you've opened the case and done anti-static nastiness. There's an element of timing and sequence to the flashing process though. It's a bit fiddly.
CM1 is fine for audio only. If it's works, no need to fix it.
If you share the log we can see if there's an obvious problem. If you don't share the log .. we are not clairvoyant. It's entirely your choice.
There is no need to unsquash/squash. Just create /storage/.config/xorg.conf with whatever content you require for your GPU and it will be used in preference to the any of the embedded conf files on next boot.
AMD supports GBM (Generic Buffer Management) which facilitates the future V4L2 pipeline same as every other GPU/SoC vendor. nVidia has decided to follow their own "standard" that nobody else uses. Team Kodi are done with supporting proprietary standards due to all the extra code spaghetti and support work it entails so AMD (and basically all other current vendors except nVidia) are fine and support for nVidia in Kodi will almost certainly die off. We see it as nVidia's responsibility to start following standards, not our responsibility to rewrite everything around nVidia.
Not at the moment. Maybe in the future (but in a different fashion) once things go mainline, although that will require a complete reinstall anyway as the mainline kernel does not support Amlogic's custom partition scheme.
Find a 3.14 kenel buildroot release from Amlogic that supports S905 and you should be able to use the FIPS to make something. It's all Amlogic provides to basic partners anyway. Have a look at the NanoPi K2 sources that FriendlyElec uses.
IPTV simple is installed from the LE addon repo. If you install the addon from anywhere else it's not our code and not our problem to solve.
Another approach would be using systemd mounts (see /storage/.config/system.d/ for samples) to locally mount the remote file shares. Each mount can use different options for protocol versions. Then set sources to the local mounts and scrap to the library.
It depends on the specific hardware. In some cases you can flash the firmware to be region free accepting any disc forevermore without extra input. In other cases the drive will still behave as if region locked; it will prompt for a region change and counts down the number of allowed region changes until zero is reached and it self-resets back to 5-6 attempts remaining (or whatever the magic number is). It's still rare to find region free drives, but these days there are numerous websites where you can acquire modified firmware and the flashing utilities needed.
I'd create a webpage that sends JSON-RPC commands to play specific media (from the local filestore) on a specific device. Kodi has a full API for that kind of thing - it's how the Android/iOS remote apps and WebGUI(s) are implemented. You can place media in a central location and use cron + rsync to run a nightly sync job to update local media.
The main factor is the hardware and what it's technically capable of playing. For example; Odroid C2 has an S905 chip (not S905X, S905D or other lettered variants). This means it can play 8-bit H.264 media and 8-bit or 10-bit H.265 (HEVC) media. It will not play 10-bit H.264 (it will try to software decode it, but the CPU can't cope) and it will not play 10-bit HEVC files with HDR encoding (as the original S905 doesn't support HDR). To get a more specific answer you'll need to share a Kodi debug log that shows the problem media being played. The log has information on the encoding (and other factors) and from there we can make more educated guesses on what the problems are. Sometimes it's unsupported media. Sometimes it's just badly encoded media.
The UPnP client is embedded and cannot be disabled, but it's probably not the problem unless you're trying to use UPnP sources?
I'd also remove the cache tweaking from your advancedsettings.xml file.
I'm not sure what you really mean by narrowcasting .. but LE boots directly into Kodi, and using a simple autostart.py script you can start a playlist on Kodi startup. For stability and performance use an Ethernet and don't be tempted with wireless. Kodi can be controlled over CEC on most TV's (using the TV remote) and you can deliberately disable IR support (if the box has an IR sensor) to prevent visitors trying to control the boxes. We added an SSH console keyboard in the last couple of days (will be available in the next alpha).
Hope that helps.
You can't just compile the drivers, but/and it should just work.
The backup contains /storage/.config, /storage/.cache and /storage/.kodi .. anything outside those folders (and there won't be anything in most installs) is not included in the backup.
You either have to fiddle with the partition sizes using gparted from another Linux LiveUSB (Ubuntu or similar) .. basically you shrink the storage partition and then grow the boot partition to a larger size. It's not hard but will take many hours. The alternative and usually faster option is to backup the existing contents of /storage then clean install and restore the backup. The LE settings addon has a backup/restore function.
