So is there supposed to be any benefit to running this on my i7-10510U laptop instead of the latest official nightly?
No idea. I suggested that build for troubleshooting purposes.
FYI: X11 will be deprecated and replaced with GBM in future versions of Generic LibreELEC (probably after LE10).
- Kodi-GBM instead of Kodi-X11
- Open-GLES instead of OpenGL
- Mesa 20.2.0
- Linux 5.9-rc7
- Experimental HDR patches (currently known to work only on Gemini Lake hardware).
something bare-bone (without RAM/HDD/SSD) would be preferred, but I'm open to any suggestions.
I can suggest one of the Asrock Gemini Lake ITX boards. J4105B-ITX or J4125B-ITX will do just fine. It can do 4K@60Hz (native HDMI 2.0) and HDR already works with experimental LibreELEC GBM images.
That's a passive adapter. You need an active DP to HDMI 2.0 adapter.
But when booting official release without HDR patches/advanced, I can choose my HDMI display and blank the laptop panel.
Standard Generic builds are very different, they use X11 windowing system. HDR-enabled builds don't use that. I suppose something needs to be fixed in Kodi in order to enable output to an external display on your laptop.
There is no Prime DRM option to activate on Kodi Player windows config...
DRM PRIME is a Linux thing.
HDR will not work in Windows on GLK. No HDR support in Windows driver AFAIK.
WinSCP will reveal a lot more folders 
So again SMP, is there a way to boot from a GLK laptop
I'm not familiar with this hardware, so no idea.
Use WinSCP or something similar.
Copy /usr/share/kodi/addons/skin.estuary to /storage/.kodi/addons. Then you can edit the xml files.
Is there a way i can replace the firmware in LibreElec from commandline?
Copy it to /storage/.config/firmware and reboot.
Chroma subsampling : 4:4:4 on the one that won't play - maybe the pi's decoder doesn't support it?
No hardware decoder would support it. It should be playable with software ffmpeg decode though.
ASRock B360M + i3-8100 + DP2HD4K60H
AFAIK DisplayPort 1.2 does not support HDR so that should not work.
The 8-bit patch is for lspcon only. It has nothing to do with Gemini Lake.
Curious - does that patch read to you as if the NUC will output only 8bit?
Yeah, it forces the output to 8-bit.
Did you ever try Windows on your NUC? I wonder if Windows driver also force 8-bit.
There is a new LSPCON patch which suppose to fix a black screen issue.
Here's a new build if you wanna try it.
Gemini Lake users can use this build too. I updated Kodi and LE to a current master and added a missing patch that makes switching to HDR mode more consistent.
