Hello!
I’m new here and I’ve recently decided to give Kodi a spin. Before I begin setting up hardware and stuff I have a few questions to ask. Please bear with me because some of these questions might sound newb-ish, but legitimately I lack the answers. My current situation: I have a number of smart HD LED TV’s in the house, but the one I’m focusing on is in the living room. I originally wanted to attach a full desktop PC to it and to use it as a media device. Later on I thought about using a laptop instead, but stop there? Why not settle for something even smaller? After doing some research about Kodi I found a lot of comments and reviews which claim that a “Chromebox offers best value for the money”. So Chromebox it is. Anyway, here are the questions:
Transcoding support
I have multiple smart TV’s in the house that are connected to my LAN. At one point I’ve setup a small linux DLNA server with various media on it. While the TV’s were able to stream the contend I noticed that lots of files were missing. The reason behind this is that the TV’s lacked codec support such as Ogg Vorbis and the like. Now I’m wondering, if I can use the chromebox with Kodi as a transcoding server to convert the media to a format that these dumb TV’s will understand. Is this possible (kodi transcoding + DLNA server)?
Audio passthrough
Oh boy, almost forgot about this one. Can I assume that a chromebox has a HDMI port with audio passthrough, meaning that the HDMI will transfer *video* AND *audio* over the same cable? I recon back in the days when HDMI first came out some desktop GFX cards didn’t support this. So tl/dr: Can I expect to see audio+video on the TV that’s only connected via a HDMI cable or do I need any extra audio cables?
Linux desktop
Okay, while I’d like to run Kodi on the device I’d also like to use it as a desktop environment i.e. Firefox web browser, LibreOffice Writer and similar stuff. Basically I’d just do a full linux installation on it. What are the tradeoffs, if I want to use the device for both things – Kodi and Desktop usage?
Power saving
How is power saving handled? Can a chromebox be powered off or put to sleep or at least do the CPU frequency scaling to reduce power usage while not being used? How to power it back on (wake it up)? Anyone with some experience on this one?
Chromebox
I’m currently looking forward to buying a Chromebox as a dedicated Kodi device. Do you perhaps have any reasone why I should use some other device? If not, I’d like to know which device to go for – I’ve been looking at Asus Chromeboxes, but I can’t find any specs about different models. There are so many: M004U, CN60, CN62, M025U, M118U, M075U, etc. Which one to go for? I’d probably want 4GB RAM for desktop usage.
Any other suggestions?
Thank you for your time.
Kind regards!