Hello everyone,
I’m planning to set up Kodi on a mini PC, but I’m unsure which hardware to choose, such as a Minisforum or an Intel NUC and which once. I have a very large library of movies and shows on Jellyfin, and I’d like to use Kodi with one of the two Jellyfin plugins to stream content from Jellyfin to the Kodi box.
I tried Jellyfin for WebOS 4, but unfortunately, it has many limitations regarding codecs. My library mainly consists of REMUX files. The box needs to be able to play 4K, Dolby TrueHD, Atmos, etc. Additionally, I’d prefer it to be somewhat future-proof.
Apart from that, I will connect the Kodi box directly to an Arcam AVR31 so I can pass on the Dolby audio to it.
If the CPU has hardware decoding then you’re good. As the CPU basically offloads the processing power.
You are right, audio processing is next to nothing and passthrough will work.
The only reason (for me) to grab a powerful CPU would be so I could do other things on it. & So it lasts for the next decade. An example would be AV1 which is gaining more popularity (YouTube announced that all videos will be av1 now). At the moment hardware decoding is not great for PCs but it will get better. Even so a more powerful CPU will be able to handle it.
Thanks for the info. I like the miniPC form factor as it fits nicely with the rest. I got a eye on a Minisforum UN100L. I have taken a look at the CPU it has and as far as i can tell it supports decoding of almost all modern formats. Might be a bit overkill for the usecase. I thought about the Minisforum N40 but reading the specs of the CPU/GPU it supports 4K 30hz for HDMI not 60hz unfortunately.
It seems others have confirmed it can play 8K-10bit AV1 !!! https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=375492
That is very promising!! I checked the spec on the minisforum page but it did not list 8K only 4K 60hz with HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.