About a year ago libreElec decided to cut older drivers for kodi 17.
I have a feeling you were misinformed back then. LibreELEC has always provided both Nvidia's legacy and new stable video drivers. I do not know by heart which exact driver versions have been currently bundled, but both are available. We may not pick every single new Nvidia driver for LibreELEC, but as you build your own LibreELEC release, choosing a different video driver is not a problem. Which graphics card do you have?
If you are unable to run a 64-bit version of LibreELEC (try booting it from a USB stick), then I'm afraid you are stuck with the last 32-bit build of OpenELEC.
Replacing the GPU in such nettop boxes is not an option. It is simply soldered to the motherboard. The best option for 4K video is simply to get better/newer hardware such as Amlogic S905 based boxes. Your Acer Revo will never properly display 4K videos with the ION-1 onboard graphics card.
I'd switch to Confluence first before upgrading.
Kodi 17 defaults to Estuary which is the new default skin.
After all updates are done, including skins, you can select your specific skin.
One thing I noticed that you used a pretty old version of MKVmerge, version 10.0. Is the rest of your video tools equally outdated?
Right now, MKVtoolnix is 10 version further as v20.0, and I imagine that MKVmerge has had some upgrades as well. There have been fixes for HEVC videos over time.
I meant the controller on the external harddrive, although Western Digital should not have these problems.
NTFS has a somewhat limited support on Linux, I don't know about ExFat.
Let us know if EXT4 cures the problem. Also try to use Samba/SMBv2 or v3 in your network connections. Samba v1 is not longer used due to security issues.
Welcome to the other side 
1) Nope. The size of the system partition has been increased over the years, so a full fresh installation is very much recommended. (Or you can resize the system partition manually with tools like PQmagic, if you think you can manage that)
i use a 1024mb size since all the talks about what the system partition size should be...
2) I don't know all skins that are Kodi 17 "proof", but with a fresh install you will need to install it separately anyway.
3) Basically, yes. Having a good backup is always handy.
4) LibreELEC has recently stopped using SMBv1 by default and starts with SMBv2 and up. You can still force SMBv1 support via a setting. However... In light of the worldwide WannaCry attack, you are very much encouraged to keep your network save, and set your devices/server(s) equally to SMBv2 and up.
5) You should only rename the old databases if you do NOT want to have Kodi 17 upgrade them, and want to start totally fresh. Otherwise, let Kodi do its thing (it may take some time). The old databases will not be changed and not be removed.
just do nothing and it works
If only everything was that simple 
FYI, many people from LibreELEC also work for Kodi, so posting your question on multiple forums becomes confusing, as we are not going to give answers on all forums.
As far as the external HDD goes: if you plan on connecting it permanently to LibreELEC, I suggest you use the EXT4 disk format. It is the default format for Linux for some time now. It easily supports 4TB disks.
One problem might be that the controller of the external HDD is of lesser quality or support, which makes it possible that larger disks have their hiccups. We've seen some Seagate external disks also causing issues.
Installation on a PC is a two-step adventure. Create the installer first (which you did), then run/boot the installer for the actual installation onto your PC.
Another thing is that the BIOS on my mini PC does not have an option to boot or run from the USB, only from HDD or CD.
Place the HDD into a different PC that does support USB booting, then put the HDD back into your old PC.
One thing... If the PC doesn't support USB booting, it may be too old to give a proper Kodi experience. Kodi is particular picky on graphics cards, so I'm curious for all the tech details of that mini PC.
LibreELEC is not an Ubuntu/Debian derivative, it's a plain-vanilla Linux kernel with some bells and whistles to run Kodi
Use systemctl stop kodi for halting the Kodi application. Same with start or restart commands.
Topic moved to the Amlogic section.
Glad to hear things are working, the default settings are usually okay for Intel graphics. However someof those settings can be a problem when switching to Nvidia cards as I have a GT1030 myself. Just know that Nvidia's Linux video drivers have no support for 10bit videos. They do 8 bit just fine upto 8K hevc video, but 10bit support for Linux is not on their agenda (yet?). 
I have a similar type of laptop: Core2Duo chip, X3100 graphics, 100Mbit ethernet, running the latest x86-64 LibreELEC builds. (I'm typing on it now, actually)
I can do 99% of all videos via the built-in 54g wifi adapter. So I would say using a proper 802.n USB wifi dongle would already improve on that, and give you decent connections to your video collection. For such an old setup used as a htpc, gigabit requirements are overkill.
I think that Libreelec is mostly used by people who reuse old hardware.
If delelopers think otherwise - then this project is already DEAD (or in active process of decaying)...
IMHO...
You may have to reorder your own thinking process. And know that you're not the center of the universe. We have LibreELEC users in all categories: some use older hardware, others use the very latest PCs with Intel, Nvidia and AMD graphics. And all that comes in between. Support for prehistoric hardware however WILL stop at some point in time. PCMCIA is a good example.
If your laptop is handicapped for some reason, find a solution that works for you. LibreELEC is limited in carrying drivers around for a reason, otherwise it would become just as bloated as other distributions, not to mention a nightmare for developers for infinite support on old decaying drivers/hardware. So if Windows or some Ubuntu distribution (16.04 LTS runs fine on my laptop too) has your PCMCIA drivers, use that. Otherwise get yourself an 'old' Raspberry Pi with a working ethernet port and move on.
i find that if i set offsets larger than 1second ahead, the video stops playing.
Any possibility for providing a full debug-enabled kodi.log in which the video problem arises?
i would need to slowly increment the offset until i reach my desired 3 sec offset
3 seconds of audio offset... is quite a lot. 
I do not know what is the problem. I said we will release the source.
The problem is that two weeks ago you came barging down our (forum) door in someone else's topic, with Tanix firmwares for Tanix hardware. The same goes for mr. juandoemx, posting links of MEGA downloads of unverifiable content. IMO, there is a commercial element there where the LibreELEC forum is being used as advertiser (for free). And as already pointed out, there is such a thing as the GPL licence, not to mention the lack of some type of "professional courtesy call" towards the LibreELEC team in using their source code and logo.
So for me, both your forum entries and stalling to provide sources for whatever pretext is a poor example of how to send out your business card.
Start with providing a full, debug enabled kodi.log, so we can see some internals.
Yet? How long ago? They may not be as snappy as we are, but I'd give them some more time.
*Why is h-a-i-r a censored word?
We had to take a few drastic measures to prevent spammers from infiltrating this forum with their dirty work.
Yep, networked and connections are fine.
Have you also enabled the 'Wait for Network' option to 30 seconds (Raspberry Pi's are relatively slow) so the network is initialized properly at boot?
After that, try refreshing the Kodi repository via the slide menu on the left of the screen. When that is done, all Kodi repository add-ons should be available.
