I've never tried CoreELEC to date on any device, maybe I'll give it a go !
I used it some years ago (& LibreELEC) but then ended up choosing the ubiquitous & incredibly stable U9-H which can ultimately do a little bit of everything anyway for the most part. Plus, it has always worked perfectly well with Kodi for me personally, (including the obvious benefits in conjunction with an HD audio capable AVR & an HDR capable 4K TV too). The U9-H (as an example) also ran Kodi reasonably quickly in general but a few things weren't quite as snappy as they obviously could be, (heavy skins, extended info scripts etc. would tax it a little & it wasn't quite as fluent to use with Leia as it seemed to be with Krypton either).
Additionally, also connected to my AVR is a Sky Q (sat TV box), Xbox One X, & obviously one or two of the MINIX Intel mini-PC's also doing their thing as well & frequently another MINIX Android hub for testing etc. (While they Intel mini-PC's are also great for HD audio too, sadly at present none of them support HDR.)
I have a number of NAS on the network too for multimedia etc., with one running MySQL specifically for Kodi so I only need one central database/library instead of the obvious grief of keeping an individual library managed on each & every device I may also use with Kodi. (Or, if a device has to be wiped/flashed, Kodi uninstalled/reinstalled, or another new device/OS added, I can immediately access my entire library plus all previously scraped URLs etc.
Ergo, I've been fighting the urge for some time to add in yet another device purely to run Kodi alone & nothing else ....
.... However, lol. I finally relented & have been testing CoreELEC on the U22 for a short while now. After wondering if HD audio would also work via a T5 with CoreELEC too I PM'd
@Marty to ask him if he had a CE T5 installation tutorial as well. Voila!! (I told him there was no rush but he posted the complete guide up the following day anyway
.)
I'm now well & truly sold after testing. I'm definitely going to either have a U22 or a T5 purely as a dedicated device for running CE/Kodi
. Media still looks incredibly good on my trusty old U9-H but I can definitely see a visual improvement with CE too. (AFR is working exactly as intended whereas it could sometimes be a little flaky on the U9-H on start/stop at the times when I did actively use it.) My TV is now always allowing me to use various options again that would sometimes get greyed out with a U9-H if it wasn't detecting a true YUV 444 signal as well. With CE those options are no longer greying out at all so I'm obviously getting the enhanced benefits there & the display improvements are notable. Blacks with 1080p Pure Direct are certainly far deeper & richer, whites are cleaner, colours are a touch more vibrant again. (4K/HDR content is still no different as the U9-H & TV were obviously communicating properly there, that still looks absolutely incredible whichever device I use.)
Then there's the sheer speed of Kodi itself
. The T5 isn't quite as snappy as the U22 (not surprising) especially in the menus with my sizeable libraries, with complex skins, or if using certain scripts etc., but the T5 certainly isn't slow at all either
. I eventually avoided using extended info scripts etc. on the U9-H as they ended up taking some time to react/load. Some things still take a couple of seconds on the U22 or a little extra on the T5 but hell are they quick lol, & obviously that's from an SD card too. (Installed to the eMMC there's the potential for even more speed & most features probably would be nigh on instantaneous.). If you want to shift back over to Android for any reason, the option to reboot from the eMMC is in the CE Kodi shutdown menu & you're back in, in the time it takes to load Android.
Conclusion: Hell yes give it a go mate lol .
(It literally takes no more than 10 mins to download, burn CE to an SD & actually have it completely configured, connected & running. If you know Kodi well too obviously you can fly through the configuration or even drop certain user data files from another device onto a USB stick & drop them into Kodi to save some additional config too, or you can still use a backup from another Kodi. All you really have to lose is a few hours testing & exploring the new possibilities, but the potential gains are significant
. As always lol, my biggest regret is not doing it sooner
.)
Obviously many thanks to
@Marty . As well as many others too of course who have posted up various information or experiences, I've been following
@pusb87 's CoreELEC journey & testing quite closely under a few threads in particular. That's what eventually sold me to give it all another go recently, so mucho credit to him convincing me too, (albeit unknowingly)
.
