[wrxtasy]

I cannot understand the 'no internet' requirement. Kodi without metadata is no fun. I assume tine media manager uses the internet to get metadata.

Don't forget with external media scrapers you can store all Metadata and movies in their own folders on an external HDD. No need for an internet connection then once everything is properly scraped. The other bonus is that the HDD library is then very portable between Kodi distributions and platforms.

[wrxtasy]

Is there Linux HEVC decode support on the Odroid? Android doesn't really float my boat for Kodi purposes - had hoped that there would be an (unofficial) OpenElec or similar lightweight distro around that supported it. Was thinking about trying a C1, potentially as a TV Headend front & backend (GigE appeals for that purpose) but if HEVC is Android only I'll wait.

Yes there is an unofficial distro of Kodi 14.2 / OpenElec and its very quick, even on a lowly 3 year old class 4 micro SDHC card. No H265 support in that one yet. The TV Headend server is available in the unofficial OpenElec repo. I've copied over the usb DVB-T DiBcom firmware over from an RPi and the server is working well.
*** Just tested, TVHeadend server works very well with no slowdowns when recording 2 HD Channels whilst streaming HD over a local network to two clients. I'm impressed !

I'm thinking of moving my TV Headend server over to OpenElec Isengard on the OC1 when H265 support is mainstreamed due to its speed and GigE ethernet too.

There is also a Ubuntu 14.04LTS distro that has Kodi Isengard experimental H265 decoding in its Kodi distro, that H265 support is still a WIP during brief testing. Its nice and quick as well.

No 24p support on either of those distros tho, but a 50Hz Kodi GUI and 25i/50i 1080p TV works very well.

The highest bitrate H265 file I have is a 1080p / 3176Kbps / 6CH file and it plays fine in Android MXPlayer. Video quality is superb. No sources for this will be discussed.

A 1.4 Ghz Celeron Chromebox using software decoding would definitely not be able to play this file. Even the Core i3-4010U Chromebox would have issues. You really need hardware HEVC support.

[noggin]

Is there Linux HEVC decode support on the Odroid? Android doesn't really float my boat for Kodi purposes - had hoped that there would be an (unofficial) OpenElec or similar lightweight distro around that supported it. Was thinking about trying a C1, potentially as a TV Headend front & backend (GigE appeals for that purpose) but if HEVC is Android only I'll wait.

Yes there is an unofficial distro of Kodi 14.2 / OpenElec and its very quick, even on a lowly 3 year old class 4 micro SDHC card. No H265 support in that one yet. The TV Headend server is available in the unofficial OpenElec repo. I've copied over the usb DVB-T DiBcom firmware over from an RPi and the server is working well.
*** Just tested, TVHeadend server works very well with no slowdowns when recording 2 HD Channels whilst streaming HD over a local network to two clients. I'm impressed !

I'm thinking of moving my TV Headend server over to OpenElec Isengard on the OC1 when H265 support is mainstreamed due to its speed and GigE ethernet too.

There is also a Ubuntu 14.04LTS distro that has Kodi Isengard experimental H265 decoding in its Kodi distro, that H265 support is still a WIP during brief testing. Its nice and quick as well.

No 24p support on either of those distros tho, but a 50Hz Kodi GUI and 25i/50i 1080p TV works very well.

Is that no 24p on either the OpenElec or Ubuntu builds? So only 24p if you are in Android? Hmm - whilst 1080/50i, 720/50p and 576/50i are all important to me, I do watch quite a lot of 24p/23.976p content and can't watch with 3:2 pulldown. No 24p/23.976p output natively would be a deal breaker (I could cope with 24.000Hz playout of 23.976Hz content with audio resampling now we have DTS HD MA decoding support appearing)

[wrxtasy]

No perfect 24p in OpenElec or Android, not sure about Ubuntu. Refresh rate switching works for 23.976fps when the TV switches to 24p, but no video speedup or audio resampling is taking place so a video glitch is apparent every 40 seconds or so.

[essential]

Wait a couple weeks and get a Nvidia Shield Console (release date is supposed to be May 2015).
http://shield.nvidia.com/console

Android base, should be able to load sideload Kodi easily, hardware H265 (and any other codec/extension including 4k), external HDD support, will have an optional media remote and work with Harmony remotes.

Only issue is it misses your price point, it'll be $199 with a controller ... which might appeal to you for your kids (assuming they want to play any Android games offline). If you sell the controller on eBay or something you'll hit your $170 price point. Not sure what the media remote will cost you, or if you have a Harmony you could use with it.

[theplunger]

I have to say I'm still kind of lost. my last post I had some questions about the ChromeBox. The post from then were all over the map. Does anyone have a chromebox that can answer my questions or has the general feeling of everyone changed, for me to consider something else? What wrxtasy wrote about the cromebox is making me worry that it can't do the job.

Essential: The Nvidia Shield isn't out yet nor has it proven itself. I'm looking for something known to work well with the issues I stated above in my other post.

[nickr]

Have you read this?

http://kodi.wiki/view/Chromebox

Also I would avoid h265 until the technology matures. Hard drive space is cheap.

[theplunger]

Ok. If Chromebox or any Minix boxes won't do the trick nor any other box out there currently, I have no choice once again to delay. Do not close this thread. I will be back from time to time to ask if anything has come out that can fully handle H.265. ...even though some boxes say they can, but can't. Thank you guys for the replies.

[nickr]

Why are you so set on h265?

[wrxtasy]

Sorry for straying off topic, I will get specific now.

Amlogic:
http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/04/25/a...-and-s812/

These type of media boxes based on Amlogic SOC's will do the h265 job:

- ODROID-C1
http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php

- MK808B Plus
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=210220
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=94268

- Measy B4A
http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box/pp_68060.html

- Rikomagic MK12
http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box/pp_136054.html

- Beelink S82 Plus
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=216083

Kodi Purists will say they cannot put up with a lack of 24p (23.976fps) perfect video sync. Playing 23.976fps video at 60Hz in Kodi will result in very minor video judder when the camera moves sometime left <<->> right in a video scene.

This annoys the video purists, others frankly don't care. Especially those in that have likely been viewing video such as Netflix like this for a while now and not even noticing.

Everything is a compromise at the moment, unless you buy expensive Intel NUC's. The first two devices are approx $35. The MK808B Plus comes a power supply, HDMI cable and a few other bits.

So summing up, get a Chromebox if you want HD Audio and perfect 24p video, BUT no high bitrate H265 hardware decoding.
The other devices if you want H265 hardware decoding, no perfect 24p and no HD audio. Although HD audio decoding will be coming down the pipe to these devices in future just like what is occurring with the RPi2 at the moment.

[DocG]

I will be back from time to time to ask if anything has come out that can fully handle H.265.

Oh, almost forgot, I've got something that can fully handle H.265 already, or at least has played every single HEVC file I've thrown at it, high bitrate 4K included... my Sony TV. If I could now just tell Kodi to pass through HEVC.

[theplunger]

Why are you so set on h265?

Why am I set on h265? Because I already have way too many mkv h.265 files, and I want to continue to get them. Why? They are small in size. They uses less of my bandwidth and takes up less of hard drive. If I could wave a magic wand all my movies would be in 1080p with h.265 and TV shows would be in 720p with h.265. And while I have that wand out I would have a htpc box that also has RCA (Red, Yellow, White) jacks a long with HDMI. Why? One of the TV's this box would be plugged into is a very large SD projection TV.

On my personal pc Kodi is slow as hell. I know I'm feeding it a lot to show on the menu covers, but man! Plex is a total joke and is very slow and is harder to set up. Kodi needs to be more flexible with its main menu. Say for example it needs to show, TV, Movies, Anime. Also delete menus not wanted. I've looked into this and code needs to changed, I can't do that! ...or get lucky and land the perfect skin. I've yet to find that.

[Tinwarble]

And why do you have too many h.265 files?

Since they are small sized h.265 files, then they are compressed files and you could get the same quality h.264 compressed file at nearly the same size.

You stated that you aren't interested in 4K, then if that is the case you don't really need h.265 for 1080p or 720p files. Because quality vs quality, h.264 and h.265 will be the same with only about a few 100MB (give or take) difference between them.

I have tested compressing many different movies with both h.264 and then h.265, and to get the same quality file with a BD movie is not worth the small amount of space it saves to use h.265.

[Drag0nFly]

Don't mean to threadjack, but felt I had to chime in here. I realize HEVC is still in the early stages wrt. support and even the API itself, which might change, but "Small amount of space"? I've had good success with HEVC encodes for tricky / 'uncompressable' Blu-Rays (at reasonable quality settings).

My own observations:

Test 1 (AVC source):

H.264 (142 r2495 6a301b6) encoded at CRF 18: 28Gb
H.265 (1.5 stable) encoded at CRF 19 (which is considered higher quality than than CRF16/17 x264 encodes): 15Gb, ref. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265

Size of original feature: 37G


Test 2 (VC-1 source):

H.264 (142 r2495 6a301b6) at CRF 19: 26Gb
H.265 (1.5 stable) encoded at CRF19: 17Gb

Size of original feature: 31G

Up until now, everything I am throwing at x265 has shown significant improvements in compression while retaining quality.

[DocG]

It is simply not true that you could get the same quality H.264 compressed file at nearly the same size as H.265. H.265 files are considerably smaller as you can achieve the same (perceived) quality with a much lower bitrate. This has not just the advantage of using a lot less space, but a lot less bandwidth. Not everyone has unlimited quotas, and the smaller the files, the cheaper it'll be to get them. Yes, that's right, some people actually download their content from the internet. This also means they don't necessarily get to choose what format the files are in. If sources are H.265, then that's that. Not sure how it is for others, but I, personally, prefer to just be able to play the files I have. As far as I'm concerned, I'd want for everyone to switch to H.265 now. Enough of H.264 and Hi10P already!