Hardware Recommendation
#1
All

I am looking for an android box for XBMC and I'd greatly appreciate any recommendations. The following are my main goals.

1. The ability to work well as a PVR client. Particularly, it's really important to me to get good quality deinterlacing of 1080i MPEG-2 content. I understand that some people are less sensitive to this, but bad deinterlacing artifacts drive me nuts.

2. Generally good media playback support.

3. The ability to stream netflix at 1080p (which I understand to be supported in newer versions of Android).

4. (Optional) support for a usb camera for Skype.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions
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#2
price point?
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#3
I'm pretty flexible if it works.
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#4
THey reasonw e ask for a price point is becuase these types of things have a massive range aka all the way from a $35 chromecast up to $1000s of dollars for a prebuilt system to $100s of thounsands for a dediced media room. Heres a good example of range. $35-$50 chromecast or rasberry Pi along with a bunch of Media boxes running things like Rockchip 3188, $80-$140 more power boxes like the Amazon Kindle Fire and other android devices or a lower power x86 based baytrail device like a NUC N2820 for example. $150-$200 or so you start getting into the price point of a Chromebox running a haswell Celeron 2955U my prices might be off slightly thanks to deals and what not that may be going on at times. So yeah that is quite a range right now for example. This is why we ask about a price point.

I personally have a chromecast since I have all my media on a single device sharing over DLNa and I can use bubbleupnp server ontop of PS3 Media server to push my media to all my DLNA enabled devices and even to to the chromecast thanks to bubbleupnp. I personally have the chromecast in the bedroom and a dLNA enabled bluray player in the livingroom that has a built in 5.1 speaker system so that is covered. all this is served up by my Main gaming pc with a i5 3570k which handles transcoding quite nicely when needed.
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#5
I'm fine with paying $200-300. As for NUCs it was my understanding that they do not have fully fleshed out android distributions and that there is no way to watch HD Netflix (or netflix at all) in Linux.
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#6
Celeron chromebox is great. It works very well for XBMC. You can even swap OS on the fly and get any video viewable through a browser on chrome OS including Netflix. And it's really cheap. The HP chromebox is 150.00, but only has a single ram slot. The Asus which has two slots varies from 150.00 to 170.00 depending on sales. The 16gb m.2 sata SSD and 2gb ram are more than adequate for XBMC. If you need more storage, you can add USB3 drives or buy a larger SSD for not much money.
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#7
(2014-09-12, 20:00)fyodor Wrote: I'm fine with paying $200-300. As for NUCs it was my understanding that they do not have fully fleshed out android distributions and that there is no way to watch HD Netflix (or netflix at all) in Linux.
Why do you want to run Android?
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#8
(2014-09-12, 20:22)DrowningApe Wrote: Celeron chromebox is great. It works very well for XBMC. You can even swap OS on the fly and get any video viewable through a browser on chrome OS including Netflix. And it's really cheap. The HP chromebox is 150.00, but only has a single ram slot. The Asus which has two slots varies from 150.00 to 170.00 depending on sales. The 16gb m.2 sata SSD and 2gb ram are more than adequate for XBMC. If you need more storage, you can add USB3 drives or buy a larger SSD for not much money.

Will it work with the PVR functions? Will it do 1080i deinterlacing well?

(2014-09-12, 20:26)Stereodude Wrote:
(2014-09-12, 20:00)fyodor Wrote: I'm fine with paying $200-300. As for NUCs it was my understanding that they do not have fully fleshed out android distributions and that there is no way to watch HD Netflix (or netflix at all) in Linux.
Why do you want to run Android?

For the reasons identified in the second half of the sentence. Also, Android includes some other good streaming apps (HBO Go, etc).
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#9
Yes, and yes. Also, chrome OS will soon have the ability to run android apps natively.
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#10
Thanks-can you point me to how one swaps on the fly between Linux and chrome?
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#11
Ctrl-d I think? Lots of info on the chromebox thread
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#12
Great. Thanks all.
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#13
Hey,

You should also check out Budget HTPC Build for Under $250
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