[Hardware] Seeking advices on new hardware for OSMC

General Discussion
1

Hi Everyone,

I am posting here in the event that some of you might have some experience to share with hardware solutions for OSMC. As i am brand new on this forum, despite having been an OSMC user for a while, here are some details about my current setup:

  • 1 RaspBerry Pi 2B and 1 Raspberry 3 installed with latest OSMC. They sync their resume points using MariaDB on the Synology NAS.

  • 1 Synology NAS DS214 with Synology DSM. Its MariaDB database hosts the Kodi library and one of its Samba share contains media files to be played on Kodi.

This setup is rather fine for my needs and has served me well for the past 2 years.

However, new video features (HVEC/h.265) and hardwares since came up. Therefore, i am currently in the process of renewing this setup, and i would very much appreciate any feedback on the solutions you are currently using with OSMC/Kodi.

After some googling and loking around, here are some hardware solutions that looks intersting to me:

  • First, the Vero 4K seems like an awesome media center hardware. All reviews i read seems to indicate it works really great, with a smooth and conveniant Kodi experience. Though, its price seems quite high for an ARM device. But i am pretty sure it worth every penny/$/€. In addition, it works fine with H265 at 1080p, which seems quite unbeatable!!

  • Another good candidates seems to be the Odroid C2. It ships with H265 hardware decoding, which is pretty convenient and is missing on all of my Raspberry Pi devices. However, it is not yet clear to me which tweaks are needed to get it to run Kodi, including full H265 support. It is less expensive than the Vero 4K, but the little amount of money involved may not worth the trouble configuring all the Operating System by yourself.

  • Last but not less expensive, I am also considering switching to a newer NAS device. The idea would be to get one with H265 transcoding, which associated with Plex media server (on the NAS) could enable any OSMC device (including my raspberry Pi’s) using the Plex client to play H265 without any trouble. However, this solution looks quite expensive, and i do not know if it will handle H265 at 1080p that well…

If you have tested any of these hardware or software solutions, or if you have a personal opinion about them ,i am very interested on your feedbacks!! In the meantime, have a great weekend!

2

Unfortunately, the ODroid C2 doesn’t run OSMC. There’s been some discussion about this, but it doesn’t seem like anything will be happening any time soon.

The Vero 4K is the best way forward for you by the sounds of it. You say it’s higher priced than other devices, but there’s a reason for that. If you like OSMC, and want something that just works with regular updates for the next five years, then it probably makes sense for you. You’ll get 10-bit, HEVC, 4K and HD audio, not to mention very good hardware. You get a device, power supply, HDMI cable, RF remote (not IR like other devices), built-in 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. If you add all of these things separately to something like an ODroid C2, you’d be spending more with no guarantee / commitment to updates and support.

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And surely not 4k which might be needed in the future.

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Sam, fzinke, thank you very much for your replies.

@sam_nazarko : I also came to the conclusion that Vero 4K seems to be the right choice here. I am just trying to confirm this here. As i said, I thing the Vero 4K features worth the extra, but i am looking for some feedback on other alternative solution, just to be sure.

@fzinken : Did you have any experience with media transcoding on NAS devices? Might it be interesting to use with the Vero device??

Have a nice sunday!

5

No never used that, for me the NAS (Network attached Storage) has the function to serve the files in my LAN and the mediacenter has the job to decode and display them