If you need/want HDR support then the RPi4 is probably the best option.
I'm a Gemini Lake user with a ASRock J4105-ITX, and its great with the exception of HDR. Supposedly its capable of HDR but the drivers are lacking, there are beta builds floating around on the forums for HDR, but at this stage no idea when it'll make it into a stable release.
I've generally found the UI performance to be the most dependent on storage performance. Are you booting from SD card or USB? If its SD card it might be worth trying some fast USB storage and see if that makes a difference.
Might be only solution.
But can you output 4K signal on one HDMI output and only the Audio on the other HDMI on the splitter?
The EZCOO splitter I linked to works fine. I've got 4k60 HDR out to my TV, and am bit streaming DTS HD-MA and Dolby TrueHD to my soundbar. You lose ARC is the only downside.
An HDMI splitter might be an option, I use one with an older HDMI 1.4b AVR.
If you are going to store recordings on the boot drive then I would go for a USB SSD. SD and USB drives aren't designed for high volumes of writes and will eventually fail.
Did you read the release notes for 10.0.2?
The Digibit avoids the need to muck around with drivers in Linux / LibreELEC which is the achilles heel of DVB tuners. My Digibit R1 sits on a shelf in my rack and never misses a beat, hands down the best DVD-S2 tuner I've ever had and I've had a few.
CA configuration is not different using the Digibit than with a USB/PCI tuner.
A problem with those HP and Lenovo SFFPC’s is they don’t have HDMI ports so you’re forced into the dark world of DP to HDMI adapters and finding one that’ll do 4k60 isn’t easy.
In my view go with a pc with a known HDMI 2.0 port or the RPi4. Be aware that the Intel builds for LE don’t yet support HDR.
In theory it will do 4K as it’s Gemini Lake, but the Asus website doesn’t confirm it has a HDMI 2.0 port and lists the max resolution as 4k 24hz.
If you're looking for a drop in replacement I'd probably hold off till we see Jasper Lake ITX boards from ASRock etc.
Something like the ASRock J5040-ITX would be a good option today, but it doesn't have an M2 port. You can likely get an adapter for the PCIe 1x slot if NVMe is really key to your use case. For LibreELEC NVMe is probably overkill.
Otherwise you'll probably need to go to something like LGA 1200 to get a M2 port, an i3 or low spec CPU would probably suffice.
The RPi4 would be an option too if you're willing to compromise on your Intel requirement, perhaps replace the DVB-S2 tuner with something like a Digibit R1.
For LibreELEC the RPi4 is your best option of the two. To get the full benefits from the Pi you need to run nightly's at the moment, but I think there was a comment previously that these improvements would be backported to the next 10.0.X release.
It would be great to get some feedback on the LE10 testbuild as well, initial testing here looked good, but we'd like to have some more positive confirmation that things work as expected before adding the backport patches to official LE10 releases.
Installed on my spare machine, so far so good. Have flicked through a few channels with 1080i content and it looks as good as my main Intel HTPC. TV isn't 4K so haven't had a chance to try that or HDR etc yet.
Thanks for the help, think its a false alert.
I am running the BanIP package on OpenWrt and looks like addons.libreelec.tv is being blocked by one of the blacklists. Will do some digging to find out which blacklist but for now the package is disabled and everything is running as expected.
Clean install on LE 10.0.1 on an x86/Intel box and I'm unable to access the LE repo. My Google'ing indicates its a NTP issue, but fixing the time doesn't seem to be working.
Kodi logs -> ix.io/3IDK
NTP -> ix.io/3IDR
Interestingly LE has my time zone as Antarctica/McMurdo even though it set to New Zealand/Auckland in the Kodi GUI. If I change the time zone in the GUI to New Caledonia it show correctly on the CLI.
Can I force the time zone manually by the CLI?
Amazing! Just did an upgrade from 10.1 to the latest nightly and deinterlacing is running well. Done a few test runs with some 1080i content and so far so good.
Starting to see lots of interesting options using these SOC's coming to market, do you think they'll get mainline support? or perhaps LE too?
I assume still no hardware deinterlacing? Will the working being done on deinterlacing for the Pi help here?
The majority of issues with RPi4 are due to bad PSUs, bad cables, Argon cases, users not reading release notes that detail differences between old and new ways of doing things and/or having fundamentally wrong expectations to start with.
Any chance you can expand on your concerns re Argon cases? I love mine, the form factors is a big win for me.
