[ronmiles]

OK, so I have a redundant PC hanging around and thought what a good idea it would be to build a KODI server. It's an Asrock Atom 330 HT with the usual specs, I realise their will be a situation regarding the graphics but what OS would be recommended.

Any replies gratefully received.

Ron.

[PatK]

Key in most home theater and multi-media set-ups is the graphic engine, a modern graphic card is important. Supported hardware (wiki) and I would certainly make the hardware forum a top visit https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=112 Searching 'Atom 330 HT' brings up the CPU but not the MB and given these short constraints, I would be looking at LibreElec or one of the all in solutions.

A Linux variant is much more efficient (at least 3x) without a lot of the baggage windows comes with.

[trogggy]

+1 on what PatK's saying.  I have a couple of revo r3610s (now retired from media playback duties) that were very usable with libreelec but horribly slow with kodi on windows.
Libreelec probably has lower overheads than any alternative, so that would be my first thing to try.  You can also have it up and running from a usb stick in minutes if you want to test.

[ronmiles]

Key in most home theater and multi-media set-ups is the graphic engine, a modern graphic card is important. Supported hardware (wiki) and I would certainly make the hardware forum a top visit https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=112 Searching 'Atom 330 HT' brings up the CPU but not the MB and given these short constraints, I would be looking at LibreElec or one of the all in solutions.

A Linux variant is much more efficient (at least 3x) without a lot of the baggage windows comes with.

Hi PatK, thanks for the reply. The  330 HT (home theatre) is a nettop box with the Nvidia Ion GPU which will probably mean no acceleration. I tried Kodibuntu, which is supposed to be compatible, but it refuses to load and cycles.

[ronmiles]

+1 on what PatK's saying.  I have a couple of revo r3610s (now retired from media playback duties) that were very usable with libreelec but horribly slow with kodi on windows.
Libreelec probably has lower overheads than any alternative, so that would be my first thing to try.  You can also have it up and running from a usb stick in minutes if you want to test.

Thanks Trogggy, I'll keep that in mind.

[Klojum]

The  330 HT (home theatre) is a nettop box with the Nvidia Ion GPU which will probably mean no acceleration

I still have one of those, collecting dust right now. The only 'new' video format it will do with hardware acceleration is h264 up to 1080p resolution. All others like h265/hevc, VP8 or 9 will turn the ION into an overheating slide show machine.

It depends on your 'use case' as to what type of video format(s) you are going to play the upcoming year or two. Plenty of cheap Android boxes will that job just fine. Possibly a Raspberry Pi 3B+ setup will be enough for you. The RPi outperforms your ION machine.

[emveepee]

My older Asrock ION 300 also collected dust for years largely because I found the fan too noisy for use in the media room.  I re-purposed it a few years ago as a simple OpenMediaVault NAS (using Debian Stretch) with a 2TB drive and it did everything I want for my system for recording from my PVR, although I wished I had the extra drives you can put on a 330. I just checked the uptime and it is at 238 days and that is since I had to change my UPS.

As a bonus I recently added docker a few months ago to run my NextPVR Kodi PVR backend and that has been working out well. 

Martin

[RockerC]

I did not lookup the exact specification of Asrock Atom 330 HT but according to wikipedia the oldest Nvidia Ion platform features Nvidia's third-generation PureVideo engine which is enough to hardware decode most H.264 videos
@ 1080p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Ion => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Pur...reVideo_HD

However, as the Nvidia Ion platform is of an older generation GPU equivalent to GeForce 9400M or GeForce 8400 GS and Nvidia themselves have stopped supporting those old GPUs in their newer drivers you need to use an older version of Nvidia's "legacy drivers". Nvidia legacy driver in OpenELEC was updated in LibreELEC v8 and since then it no longer works with the GeForce 7000, 8000, 9000 and 100 series GPUs. As the latest LibreELEC uses newer drivers you will either need to use an old version of OpenELEC or you need to do a search and find custom LibreELEC builds from the community that comes with an older version of Nvidia's "legacy drivers".

IMHO much better idea is to locate any other free or cheap PC / motherboard that feature an available PCIe slot then buy and install the best Nvidia GeForce GTX 1030 or 1050 or 1650 adapter that you can afford on your budget.

[Klojum]

IMHO much better idea is to locate any other free or cheap PC / motherboard that feature an available PCIe slot then buy and install the best Nvidia GeForce GTX 1030 or 1050 or 1650 adapter that you can afford on your budget.

A (really) old PC with a new video card will eat up to 100 watts/h, is noisy, and takes up a lot of space.
A Raspberry Pi 3B+ or small Android box uses 2-5 watts/h, makes no noise whatsoever, and is a fraction of the size of a full PC.

[CraigHB]

I'm just getting into Kodi box for the first time (think this is my first post here).  I've spent a lot of time browsing around the net reading about Kodi and related hardware. 

I thought about going with a PC, but so much baggage with that.  I'm pretty good with Linux and Windows, but it's still an amount of work to set up a PC media server.  Plus PCs use a lot of power, take up a lot of space, and fans can be noisy. 

I ended up going with an Odroid N2 SBC (single board computer) and CoreELEC software.  Setup is simple and fast, about close as you can get to an over-the-counter TV box.  The N2 is actually one of the more expensive SBC solutions, but still greatly cheaper than a PC and a lot less setup time using a system image ready to fly Kodi like CoreELEC.  The box is small and can sit on top of the AVR.  Power consumption is only a few Watts and it has no fans.  Fits the bill perfect for me.

[wallyweek]

I'm quite happy with LibreElec running on Raspberry PI 2.