[Sholander]

@noggin, assume you have HS400 enabled on your AM6B+, and are using the latest nightly w/the DTB performance enhancements?

Not yet - I'm still running from uSD card not eMMC - but that shouldn't impact video replay should it?

Not really, because once booted CE runs from memory so media where it resides impacts only read/write tasks; boot time, and any operation that needs writing to storage media is impacted. Playing any video does not need significant read/write so it's not impacted.

[ars92]

Maybe. Shield is still (by today's standards) a powerful, fast device. Homatics Box R 4K Plus will pale in comparison, even if it can do Dolby Vision FEL now under CoreELEC. A S928X box w/FEL sounds promising, but I don't know of any that'll do 4K Netflix, Prime, D+, etc. if those are also important to you.

Thanks. I think I'll stay put for now. And monitor the s928 situation. Hoping SEI creates a new box with s928 and Android TV 14 out of the box haha.

Yes shield is great for me due to streaming apps support and great local playback support.

But yeah I can see having the apple TV and am6b+ being the pinnacle experience for now.

[hdmkv]

Unfortunately no word since their 2022 press release 🤷.

[emveepee]

For SEI products this is a better page I think https://www.androidtv-guide.com/oem/sei-robotics/  Some 2024 devices but it looks like they are more focused on S905X5M not S928 which makes sense for broadcast OTT boxes.

[Daydream]

I have two topics that bother me:
1) Is there an Android box of any kind (either on Android or CoreElec) that would run Kodi with a (very) heavy skin (say Arctic Zephyr - Reloaded with all stuff turned on) smoothly? As in if I mesh the scroll button things will MOVE the way they do on a PC (close to 50-60 FPS), and not choppy like it's a toy for kids. Cause if not then I'll throw my remote at the TV and the reality resets and I start looking again .

2) Why is everybody so enthusiastic about all these new releases Dune 8K, Zidoo 8K, Minix 8K, Ugoos 8K, etc? They're all running on ARM Cortex A76 + Quad-Core Cortex A55 designs. One came to market in 2018 and the other in 2017. 6 and 7 year old designs. Am I missing something here? They can't build something on more recent chips architecture, something with more muscle? If I put Kodi on Samsung Ultra tablet, it flies. Sure it's a $1k device, but it has a 14.6" screen we won't need, a pen we won't need, a battery we won't need, and a lot more more memory and storage we won't need. Why can't the manufacturers put a comparatively powerful chip in an Android box? Minix is not shy about asking $350 for their S928X-K product. Like that would be something invented yesterday.

[Sholander]

Why can't the manufacturers put a comparatively powerful chip in an Android box? 

Because it's not needed for functionality it's meant for. It would be the same nonsense as putting a V8 engine in a Smart two seater.

[banggun]

I have two topics that bother me:
1) Is there an Android box of any kind (either on Android or CoreElec) that would run Kodi with a (very) heavy skin (say Arctic Zephyr - Reloaded with all stuff turned on) smoothly? As in if I mesh the scroll
button things will MOVE the way they do on a PC (close to 50-60 FPS), and not choppy like it's a toy for kids. Cause if not then I'll throw my remote at the TV and the reality resets and I start looking again .

I'd happily chime in here as over the course of the last few months I've found myself trying out many players only (Apple TV, Dune, Zidoo, Xbox and PC both on Windows and Libre Elec) and I've been finding myself going back and forth looking for the best and ultimate experience. My personal conclusion. I've ditched the idea of getting a dolby vision capable device in favour of running a smooth Kodi experience. I'll admit that I've also noticed a lot of people in this thread seem to look more for the ultimate video player rather than the ultimate Kodi expirerience (ie. something that plays plays every video format). Honestly I don't really care that much about playing every video format perfectly rather then an easy to use video interface that gives me quick and easy access to the content I like to watch. In that sense I've settled on using Windows for now (HDR and Atmos compatible) sure it may not play some more premium HDR formats but honestly I don't feel like missing out on that much and I enjoy navigating through out Kodi much more then the somewhat unstable experiences all the other players have given me. I would say when it comes to a great UI experience the only thing that comes close would be an Apple TV it has the hardware and software that compliments each other very nicely but unfortunately for me personally still has to many incompatability with certain audio formats also I have a love/hate relationship with the Apple Remote. When it comes to interface I think many like the Netflix experience with it's ability to have trailer playback however I personally find the quality of shows available on Netflix not that great I'm a picky watcher. Plenty of Kodi skins are trying to mimic this experience and I believe some have even surpassed it like Arctic Fuse which really is sublime and though lots of effort is being put into making these experiences run well on lower powered devices if you want it to run smoothly in 4K (forget that fact that most android boxes can't even run 4K because of software restrictions). Which brings us to the next point.

2) Why is everybody so enthusiastic about all these new releases Dune 8K, Zidoo 8K, Minix 8K, Ugoos 8K, etc? They're all running on ARM Cortex A76 + Quad-Core Cortex A55 designs. One came to market in 2018 and the other in 2017. 6 and 7 year old designs. Am I missing something here? They can't build something on more recent chips architecture, something with more muscle? If I put Kodi on Samsung Ultra tablet, it flies. Sure it's a $1k device, but it has a 14.6" screen we won't need, a pen we won't need, a battery we won't need, and a lot more more memory and storage we won't need. Why can't the manufacturers put a comparatively powerful chip in an Android box? Minix is not shy about asking $350 for their S928X-K product. Like that would be something invented yesterday.

I think this is the real problem the market has unfortunately really shied away from building a player that would give a great Kodi experience. For better or worse Kodi I believe is it's own worst enemy despite all it's best intentions and this is due to no fault of Kodi. The current state of streaming platforms, TV offerings and whatnot is really being torn apart. Even if you're willing to throw lots cash to all these streaming services you're still being locked into the fact that you need to use their streaming service app and will only have a great experience only if playing back in this way. Apple to some extent has tried to unify all these platforms into their Apple TV app but considering that huge amount of content available this a nearly impossible task. Kodi is the solution here being open and by its open nature has the ability to play back all of these services. Unfortunately no big companies seem willing to support Kodi or embrace due to its open nature also attracting lots of piracy at the same time. Hence you'll see the sticky on this forum as well. I believe in many cases this is not even because people aren't willing to spend worth the money but if I wanted to watch a TV show from a foreign country I would only be able to do so by either using a VPN but even then many content seems off limits due to TV stations geo-locking their content with no option to buy or subscribe to their content overseas. This is where Kodi comes in as a popular (not the only) solution for many as a lot of this content gets pirated simply because there are no other alternatives with easy addons etc. This is the same reason why lots of companies are shying from Kodi and are not embracing it even though I do believe that if Kodi gets fully embraced and had paid options to subscribe to these services it could have an amazing future.

That is the current sad state for video enthusiasts, there is no perfect player. On a personal note I also think it's interesting that we have audio players that easily costs more than a $1000 but somehow the most expensive video players right now barely go over $500 save for a few that do and those that do are actually fairly limited in their ability to play back from many different streaming platforms. It's a bit telling of the current state of video content availability and the reason why unfortunately piracy is the only option for some ....

[hdmkv]

@Daydream, Arctic: Zephyr - Reloaded is my favorite skin, and it runs just fine w/both my Ugoos AM6B+ w/CE and w/my Fire TV Cube 3. I have a large library: about 3,000 movies, and about 120 TV shows.

That is the current sad state for video enthusiasts, there is no perfect player.

I feel the opposite. This is the first time we've had do-it-all w/online streaming (like Homatics & Fire TV Cube 3) & do-it-all local media players (namely AM6B+), with high price-to-performance ratio. I mean, the AM6B+ is a fraction of what the top-end Oppo players used to cost (or the Magnetar UDP800 or 900 now), and it supports full DV + full 3D + full HD/object-based audio passthrough + plays just about any video format (just not AV1 at 4K).

[banggun]

I feel the opposite. This is the first time we've had do-it-all w/online streaming (like Homatics & Fire TV Cube 3) & do-it-all local media players (namely AM6B+), with high price-to-performance ratio. I mean, the AM6B+ is a fraction of what the top-end Oppo players used to cost (or the Magnetar UDP800 or 900 now), and it supports full DV + full 3D + full HD/object-based audio passthrough + plays just about any video format (just not AV1 at 4K).

I don't know I never tried the Fire cube as it's not available in my country though I guess I could get it from elsewhere just the network speed has me somewhat worried. I do however still own the Dune 8K which I believe hardware wise is on par with homatics/ugoos but I might be wrong. Then again as I stated previously for me it's not so much about file compatibility playback rather than a smooth 4k interface. Honestly I feel 4K is even more pronounced in the UI where I really can't stand pixelated fonts (granted I have a rather large 98 inch TV where this is easily apparent). In movies sometimes I feel it's harder to discern good quality 1080p sources from 4k so to me actually it's really the UI experience that matters to me more but I know I'm a minority here. Throughout my experience on android boxes I have had boxes either boxes limited to 1080P UI or able to render 4K but with not enough hardware power to do so smoothly. Hence in my previous post I believe only the Apple TV or Kodi on a PC provide a perfect 4K ui experience. If the Fire cube has snappy 4K UI rendering I definitely don't mind to give it a try.

[hdmkv]

Fire TV Cube 3's LAN is just 10/100, but if you use Wi-Fi 6E, you can get 600Mbps+ speeds. The big negative w/all Fire devices is their ad-ridden UI, but then again, I don't spend much time there other than to open Kodi or use SmartTube.

[signde]

Fire TV Cube 3's LAN is just 10/100, but if you use Wi-Fi 6E, you can get 600Mbps+ speeds. The big negative w/all Fire devices is their ad-ridden UI, but then again, I don't spend much time there other than to open Kodi or use SmartTube.

Correct on the WiFi 6 speeds. I've never hit 600 but I have seen 450 on Wifi on my WiFi 6 network. I don't have the fastest Wifi6 network though (AX5400). 

Also with a USB 2 ethernet adapter you can get a solid 350Mbps which is at least double what you need for even the most bitrate dense blu-ray rip on the planet. 

There are two main negatives of the latest Amazon devices IMO and the network speed is not one of them. 

The first is as mentioned above the Fire OS UI is abhorrent. Having said that, it is 100% possible to work around this using your own launcher and you will never see that garbage. The XDA forums are your friend for this and there are currently a couple of ways around it, even on the latest firmware.

The second which is not often mentioned here is that the Cube has very funky handling of a couple formats. Yes it can passthrough TrueHD and DTS-HD MA but everything else is transcoded. DD and DD+ will always be transcoded or decoded, depending on how you set the audio output. Yes you can get either one of those formats out of it but the device is still decoding then re-encoding and will never pass through both of them like for like. Someone on avsforum hipped me to this recently and it's evident because when playing them and using Alexa the audio output is manipulated. That wouldn't be possible with passthough.

[MediaPi]

I feel the opposite. This is the first time we've had do-it-all w/online streaming (like Homatics & Fire TV Cube 3) & do-it-all local media players (namely AM6B+), with high price-to-performance ratio. I mean, the AM6B+ is a fraction of what the top-end Oppo players used to cost (or the Magnetar UDP800 or 900 now), and it supports full DV + full 3D + full HD/object-based audio passthrough + plays just about any video format (just not AV1 at 4K).

I don't know I never tried the Fire cube as it's not available in my country though I guess I could get it from elsewhere just the network speed has me somewhat worried. I do however still own the Dune 8K which I believe hardware wise is on par with homatics/ugoos but I might be wrong. Then again as I stated previously for me it's not so much about file compatibility playback rather than a smooth 4k interface. Honestly I feel 4K is even more pronounced in the UI where I really can't stand pixelated fonts (granted I have a rather large 98 inch TV where this is easily apparent). In movies sometimes I feel it's harder to discern good quality 1080p sources from 4k so to me actually it's really the UI experience that matters to me more but I know I'm a minority here. Throughout my experience on android boxes I have had boxes either boxes limited to 1080P UI or able to render 4K but with not enough hardware power to do so smoothly. Hence in my previous post I believe only the Apple TV or Kodi on a PC provide a perfect 4K ui experience. If the Fire cube has snappy 4K UI rendering I definitely don't mind to give it a try.

you have a 98 inch TV but can't discern  4k? is it able to do HDR? Dolby Vision? eww imagine watching 1080p on 98 inch TV
you are okay watching 1080p for hours as long as you get 4k GUI for 5 minutes? LOL
forget fire cube, the perfect box is staring you in the eyes. something with S298X, it's the fastest none x86 SOC, can play almost everything except dolby vision and that's being worked on by coreelec devs, so a possibility that not only it will be fast and do 4k GUI but it might do every format you through at it, and is able to do 8k.

[banggun]

I feel the opposite. This is the first time we've had do-it-all w/online streaming (like Homatics & Fire TV Cube 3) & do-it-all local media players (namely AM6B+), with high price-to-performance ratio. I mean, the AM6B+ is a fraction of what the top-end Oppo players used to cost (or the Magnetar UDP800 or 900 now), and it supports full DV + full 3D + full HD/object-based audio passthrough + plays just about any video format (just not AV1 at 4K).

I don't know I never tried the Fire cube as it's not available in my country though I guess I could get it from elsewhere just the network speed has me somewhat worried. I do however still own the Dune 8K which I believe hardware wise is on par with homatics/ugoos but I might be wrong. Then again as I stated previously for me it's not so much about file compatibility playback rather than a smooth 4k interface. Honestly I feel 4K is even more pronounced in the UI where I really can't stand pixelated fonts (granted I have a rather large 98 inch TV where this is easily apparent). In movies sometimes I feel it's harder to discern good quality 1080p sources from 4k so to me actually it's really the UI experience that matters to me more but I know I'm a minority here. Throughout my experience on android boxes I have had boxes either boxes limited to 1080P UI or able to render 4K but with not enough hardware power to do so smoothly. Hence in my previous post I believe only the Apple TV or Kodi on a PC provide a perfect 4K ui experience. If the Fire cube has snappy 4K UI rendering I definitely don't mind to give it a try.

you have a 98 inch TV but can't discern  4k? is it able to do HDR? Dolby Vision? eww imagine watching 1080p on 98 inch TV
you are okay watching 1080p for hours as long as you get 4k GUI for 5 minutes? LOL
forget fire cube, the perfect box is staring you in the eyes. something with S298X, it's the fastest none x86 SOC, can play almost everything except dolby vision and that's being worked on by coreelec devs, so a possibility that not only it will be fast and do 4k GUI but it might do every format you through at it, and is able to do 8k.

Ok let's get a few things out of the way here. I'm talking about a perfect Kodi experience. Sure perfect is subjective but let's stick with the Topic title at hand "Best Kodi Media player". Now a lot of players here start to get good if you do either a couple of the following things. Use playercorefactory to load third party players (doing away with Kodi's built in player) or loading an entirely different OS on your box in order to get an acceptable Kodi experience and thereby abandoning the option to load apps such as Netflix or other streaming platforms etc pushing it dangerously close to piracy territory hence why I stated above the reason not many devices are made to be perfectly compliant with Kodi it's simply not very commercially appealing. Now are these players good with the abovementioned modifications. Sure. Perfect.... well you can decide for yourself but it's far from a great out of the box experience.

The other part is that a lot of these Android boxes are still stuck on Android 11 or 12 if you're lucky which just like their chips can hardly be called the latest tech but I agree there is potential and I do hope that in the future players like my Dune 8K can do more but as it stands it simply can't.... To me also the marketing calling these boxes 4k or 8k is sorry to say laughable if the GUI in a lot of cases can't even get render at 4K (at 60fps) let alone render past 4K . 

Lastly snarky remarks in saying I can't discern 1080p from 4k aren't helping. My TV can playback HDR10, Dolby Vision perfectly fine I'm just saying that the difference of 4k becomes more pronounced when you're looking at static content such as a UI where you try to read text rather then constant motion content such as videos where the difference is obviously still very clearly there but I'd argue less visible. Finally I'd love if all content out there was available in 4K but the simple fact is that there is still plenty of content that not available 4K hence I'm used to watching content in 1080P simply cause there isn't any better option. However hardware should allow you to render a GUI at 4k regardless of source material. But as I said previously already plenty of people in this thread care much more about 4K video playback then 4K UI so there's plenty of people that agree with you and I'm not saying it's not important but I wouldn't call players that are unable to render 4K GUI resolution out of the box as perfect .......

[hdmkv]

Correct on the WiFi 6 speeds. I've never hit 600 but I have seen 450 on Wifi on my WiFi 6 network. I don't have the fastest Wifi6 network though (AX5400). 

I had TP-Link's AXE5400 mesh (now BE63), and use wired backhaul, and have one of the satellite units just 2-3ft from the Cube 3. This is what allow 600Mbps+ speeds. For wired backhaul, was able to use these around the house & use my home's existing coaxial cabling. Of course, if Cube 3 had built-in gigabit LAN, we could've connected ethernet directly to it.

[MediaPi]

you're happy to sacrifice 4k dolby vision image so you get a 4k GUI on a 98 inch tv hat you paid a pretty penny?
you're better of getting 2 boxes, one for android and one for CoreELEC, wait for the S298X to get DV, or get AM6B+.
and just pirate like 98% are doing on Kodi, and the reason why Kodi is even relevant and survived 2 decades is because of it LOL
is what you're doing going to affect anyone? to each their own