Intel NUC and Kodi (AKA XBMC) - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 06:55:18 am
content: I'm looking at building a small home theatre PC to run Kodi. Has anyone had a play with the Intel NUCs? The good? The bad? The ugly?The only issue I found is that it doesn't support CEC over HDMI, but a small, cheap adapter can be added to add CEC support so I'm not too bothered by it.TheNUC5i7RYHis pretty well spec'd for the price.

author: gnif
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 07:37:54 am
content: It will be plenty, I am running kodi on an older Intel atom with nvidia graphics.If you need any help just ask, I am one of the xbmc/kodi devs

author: ve7xen
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 07:39:11 am
content: Another option is a ChromeBox. I'm pretty happy with Kodi on my $150 ASUS ChromeBox. A bit more work to set up and not much local storage, but it works great if your content is on the network.The NUCs are much more powerful and require less fiddling so I'm sure it'd be a great choice also.

author: gnif
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 09:48:27 am
content: If it is a dedicated box for TV also look at OpenELEC, these guys have done a wonderful job of making a very simple to use and install linux distro specifically for just this.

author: TechItApart
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 10:29:39 am
content: I really don't think you need something as powerful as a NUC to run Kodi. I'm using an Amazon Fire TV stick (also have the Fire box which is a little faster) and it works fine. Kodi is very light and by using the FireStarter app you can get also the benefits of Amazon's streaming services (Prime TV/Netflix etc) as well as Kodi streaming with one click switching between the two.

author: Sinusoidal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 11:01:10 am
content: Quote from: ve7xen on February 10, 2016, 07:39:11 am+1 for the Chromebox.I chose it about a year ago because at the time the low-end Chromeboxes had a significantly better GPU than the entry level NUCs. I've noticed Intel recently came out with a new generation so I'm not sure if that's still the case.That being said the Chromebox is a bit more finicky to setup. OpenELEC is definitely the way to go if all you want is Kodi but if you want something outside of its scope I have not had the best of luck running a full linux distro on it. So if all you want is Kodi I would highly recommend the Asus Chromebox + OpenELEC otherwise you can't go wrong with a NUC + Windows + Kodi, it will be more than powerful enough for most things you want to do with it.

author: Sinusoidal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 11:07:15 am
content: Looking into your other requirement the Pulse8 HDMI CEC adapter seems to be well supported by Kodi and should serve your purpose. For some reason no PC HDMI output I know of natively supports CEC. The Fire Stick as TechItApart suggested seems to support some basic CEC functions, but not all:http://kodi.wiki/view/Amazon_Fire_TV#CEC

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 03:15:16 pm
content: I agree that a Core i7 seems a bit much. I have several of the lower-end Gigabyte Brix in use. I like the quad core 2GHz version. Good performance for cheap, thought the video is not super good. You can throw a nice machine together for well under $200Comparison to a 2008 medium high end Core2Duo:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/how-do-i-make-my-pc-obsolete/msg849887/#msg849887

author: Muxr
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2016, 03:46:57 pm
content: I have one of the older Nucs. It's my DNS and ad-blocker, proxy etc..It's not relevant to you since I run mine headless, but they are fine machines easy to upgrade RAM and Drive too.

author: gnif
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2016, 01:24:22 am
content: Quote from: Muxr on February 10, 2016, 03:46:57 pmI am running a headless RPi2 and it is doing the following, no need for tons of power for this stuff:* Samba 4 Active Directory Server* FreeRadius Server for 802.11x authentication* Squid3 Transparent Proxy* OpenVPN Server* Full traffic control* DHCP* DNS + cache* PPPoE ClientI also have a second server with a VM on it that is a backup Samba AD Server, Radius, and DHCP server, so if the RPi goes down or I need to service it, my LAN stays up even if I loose internet. I also have the VM configured with Squid as a cache server so the RPi can use it for the cache store instead of using a USB hdd on the RPi, but it is all high availability, the server can go down and the net will still work just without any cache acceleration.I am using an Asus eeebox, but would have gone for something less powerful like an RPi2 or one of these moden embedded HDMI connector sized things if they were available at the time.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2016, 03:06:49 am
content: For around $150, you can get a Nvidia Shield that will outperform similarly priced x86 systems. It's even capable of 4K if you care about that. The GPU does pretty well for upscaling, though it can't handle the really advanced algorithms the high end desktop GPUs can. But the latter is well above $200 just for the GPU and you would have to be a videophile to really notice the difference.

author: Muxr
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2016, 03:30:08 am
content: Quote from: gnif on February 11, 2016, 01:24:22 amNice. I've been using the Nuc from before rPi 2 existed. I just sort of had it laying around from a different project. I had to get the RAM and mSATA SSD for it. I run:- OpenVPN- Privoxy- dnsmasq (which I use for dns cache and a lot of filtering for random crappy stuff like google analytics)- bind 9 (dnsmasq doesn't do root domain resolution and again I don't like using big brother google or my ISPs DNS)- ntpdAnd a few other things I need for work related testing in docker containers.. which is probably what uses most CPU.

author: kayvee
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2016, 04:03:39 am
content: Best bang for buck IMO is the RPi2 with more than enough computing power.I have converted many of my friends who previously believed you had to throw a lot more at it.Compact and small energy footprint are just bonuses.