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The celeron NUCs are plenty fine as XBMC clients. I have 2 Celeron NUCs and 1 i3 NUC all running SSD 4GB RAM and windows 8.1 and using them as XBMC clients for PVR and movies/tv and they are completely adequate for purpose. For openElec im sure you could get away with 2GB of RAM. I run Windows 8.1 on mine and use 4GB of ram but I reckon on OpenElec you could go with less. I personally believe an SSD is always good for the ultimate in no moving parts and very fast bootup/file access, so I always like to run my OS on an SSD, however I havent used OpenElec and I do understand that people run it off USB etc (although it seems the USB isnt great for thumbnail caching and such). In simple terms, if you are happy to get the 32GB SSD's for the openelec clients then you may as well, knowing you have the fastest possible setup.
Now in regards to using a celeron NUC as a "server" PC for the backend... I am not sure. The celeron MAY be a bit too lean but ultimately it probably depends on what tuners you have and how many simultaneous recordings and live streams you envisage having. My current setup is a VM with 2 cores (of an ivy bridge i5) and 4GB RAM running Windows 8.1, WMC and ServerWMC. I have 2x USB twin HD tuners, so 4 tuners all up. The recording drive is an iSCSI drive on my 4 bay NAS, whilst the VM's OS disk is on an SSD. This setup is fine even with 3 or 4 tuners active at once. Prior to this I had a physical machine with a Pentium G620 processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD for OS and the iSCSI NAS drive for recordings, running windows 8, but this setup only had 1 USB twin tuner... it was OK with 2 simultaneous streams. Both old and new setup were using GB LAN which is much preferable to wireless.
So yeah for a serverWMC backend running windows 7 or 8, 4GB ram is fine. An SSD is always preferable for OS work since its just so much faster and better for reboots etc too however in your case if you are also looking for local recorded TV storage you probably should go for the 1TB disk. I havent used a mechanical HDD for an OS disk in a while now, and never will again. Im not sure if you can outfit a celeron NUC with a mSATA SSD for the boot drive and a 2.5" mechical HDD for the recordings? In my case I was able to use a local SSD for OS, and offload the recorded TV drive to my NAS over iSCSI (note that WMC cant use a network drive for recordings so it needs to "appear" like a local drive, which iSCSI takes care of).
I cant really say what the minimum CPU spec is to run our ServerWMC backend, since I havent tried it on less than the above 2 systems. A pentium G620 is hardly a dazzling processor, but im not sure where a Celeron 2820 sits in comparison.
You could always start with getting 2 celeron NUCs first, build one as the server and 1 as an openElec client and see how you go. If the backend performance isnt up to scratch, convert that one into a 2nd openelec client and build a new backend on something a bit more powerful. If it's all good, grab a 3rd celeron and build your 2nd openelec client...
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2014-10-07, 16:45
(This post was last modified: 2014-10-07, 16:47 by scarecrow420.)
As long as it's a local drive, wmc allows it to be used for recordings so yes that would work (again I'm not sure how a usb 2 drive would go with multiple simultaneous activities but probably would be ok?)
What tuners will you use? How many active recordings/live streams would you have at once? Would be interesting to know if a celeron with external usb drive could pull it off :-)
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techmd
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I just intend to use a HDHomerun dual tuner for OTA broadcasts. So the max I would have going at once would be 2 OTA recordings while each client is streaming something or playing something off the HDD for a total of 4 simultaneous things.
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nickr
Retired Team-Kodi Member
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You can record far more than two streams on a dual tuner HDHR. I do up to 7 at some times.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
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nickr
Retired Team-Kodi Member
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Depends where you are and how your broadcaster arranges things I guess.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
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tavoc
Senior Member
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Hi there,
I have not directly an Nuc, but an Asrock J1900 TM Board running XBMCbuntu with a few custom settings and Gothan 13.2.
backend: Windows Server 2012 with DVBviewer
With LiveTV in HD there are no problems, but in SD there is heavy tearing on some channels. If "deinterlaced" is activated the whole picture starts to flicker (f.e. the logo jumps up and down).
I had to deactive the hardware deinterlacing for mpeg2. Has anyone noticed this? Is there a better way to have a decent picture?
With my workaround I have sometimes artifacts during fast movement in SD.
Backend: Asrock N3150 with Ubuntu 22.04 Server with TvHeadend
Living Room: Nvidia Shield with Kodi
Other Kodi Clients: Coreelec, Mibox, Windows
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fritsch
Team-Kodi Developer
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2014-10-10, 09:57
(This post was last modified: 2014-10-10, 09:58 by fritsch.)
Mainline 13.2 has no GPU deinterlacing at all. That setting does nothing besides jumping :-)
Use CPU multi thread decoding an SW deinterlace or upgrade to helix+vebox Intel drivers. Or use OpenELEC which has a non mainline patch named use SW filter.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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2014-10-14, 09:27
(This post was last modified: 2014-10-14, 21:33 by RideLikeTheWind.)
Power off USB ports
Does anyone know how to completely turn off this unit? I'm not bothered about having it boot up / wake up quickly etc. After I've finished watching it I turn it off (using Openelec by the way) and when it powers down the hard drive connected via the usb port keeps on running. I've tried it in the other ports as well as an alternative drive which also keeps going. Anyone got any suggestions as to how to power off the USB's?
Cheers
RLTW
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NUC Kit DN2820FYKH
Crucial DDR3L SO-DIMM 4GB
Kingston 60GB SSD
Openelec 4.2.1
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