At this point i have have been using XBMC for some years now, and i have been through countless devices looking for a device that could fulfill my fairly simple media center needs.
As my main device i have been using a aging Acer Revo R3600 with OPENELEC. Nothing has been able to beat that. But i have been looking. My problem was the fan, it was fairly loud and would sometimes drown out the audio from whatever i was watching if the volume was turned down. It did work like a charm. During the past years i have been trying out a lot of different devices trying to find a device that would offer the usage experience of my low end Acer Revo, but be without the fan and enough low power to be on all the time.
My first purchase was the REF16 Smart TV box, that was some obscure chinese product sporting AMLogic M3, 1 GB RAM and a 1.2 GHz CPU. I purchased on of these boxes due to a breakthrough one of the XBMC devs had in getting hardware accelerated video playback working on the AMLogic M3 platform. it worked, and still does actually, works great. All development for it has stopped though leaving it unsupported and on a Beta 2 version of XBMC 12.
My next attempt was to setup one of my Raspberry Pi’s with the OPENELEC build, and it is what is still in use now. Rock solid, stable, best developed XBMC distro for the Pi. The UI is a bit slow, and not due to the OPENELEC build, but simply due to the limitations of the RPi specifications. Loading remote content takes a while and navigating is obviously slower than on a higher specification platform.
My next purchase was the Odroid U3 from Hardkernel that offers an amazing 1.7GHz Quad-Core Processor and 2 GB RAM. From what i understand a lot of people are using the devices from Hardkernel without problems, i had trouble finding a usable power plug that seemed to differ from the specifications they mentioned on the info sheet, that ended up taking me almost 4 weeks finding a plug i could use. I used a high end class 10 micro SD card for running OS’s, Micro SD cards that clocked in at 30 Mb/s on a PC and ran everything from other operating systems on other platforms to general speedy usage on phones and tablets, on the Odroid however every point of navigation in every single OS i tried out resulted in a wait of anywhere in between 5 to 20 seconds rendering the device utterly useless. Playback was fairly flawless with 1080p streaming from LAN server on Android 4.2 with libstagefright rendering, but was unable to stream anything beyond 720p on Debian Wheezy or any other Linux based distribution i tried.
I sold my Odroid U3 and when i read on the OPENELEC blog that support was coming for the Cubox-i devices, i opt in and purchased a Cubox-i2 eX from SolidRun, with a dual core 1 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM. It arrived about 10 days ago, and i set it up with Kodi 14.0 “Helix” alpha 2. Navigating the user interface works flawlessly without delay, even when accessing remote content. It has passed all my usual tests with 1080p files and at this point it has not been restarted a single time and have not thrown a single error at me. It completely matches up to the usage experience, stability and supportability of the x86 experience. And in a few places of navigating XBMC/Kodi it surpasses my Acer Revo computer.
If it is the optimized version of Kodi or better hardware alone i have no idea. But the device is nothing short of amazing, and with support of OPENELEC it falls into the high end category of low price devices that offers a hardware accelerated media experience with great support and development. The device offers a 10/100/1000 Mbps ethernet connection for an actual speedy connection, HDMI 1080p with CEC controls, (although i don’t think CEC is working in the alpha build) and it even offers support for 3D if someone actual is odd enough to enjoy that.
I'm interested in the gigabit connection for future proofing, and the low power usage is great. Any idea if a CEC version is on the cards, as that would really seal the deal? I'd be interested in hearing about the bluetooth usage as well as well as the range for infrared. Thank you for sharing this.
SvarSletRaymond @ CKS Global Solutions LTD