Hi all,
I have ordered a VIM2 with VTV board. My intention is to replace my aging PC based HTCP with something a bit more discrete and efficient. After extensive searching I decided to go with the VIM2 because of the VTV board. I will be running off the eMMC with an external hard drive for all my media and a USB DVD drive for the few times we still watch DVDs. I wil be adding a HD Star external USB sat receiver so that I can record and watch at the same time.
Previously I found that the performance of Android TV on a M8S s812 box was abysmal and I had to run a special Libreelec build on the box. This has its limitations as no one will ever produce an updated Libreelec for this box so eventually it will just stop working.
I run Libreelec on my PC but because I am running an old Sat card - I can no longer upgrade and again eventually support will fade away for that version of Libreelec.
So that brings me to my question, is the Android Kodi experience good enough on the VIM2 for it to be a daily driver for my main HTCP system running a TVheadend server for other remote boxes. I have read of people having Samba issues with Kodi on Android and that would be a complete deal breaker for me. Also, is the frame rate switching issue resolved ? The main advantage, as I see it with the Android box is a bit more flexability and the guarantee that upgrades to Kodi will be coming down the playstore path.
On the other hand, I run Libreelec on three boxes at the moment, and it has mostly been excellent (even on a Pi2) and robust with excellent performance.
Things to consider is
Will I be trapped again in an un-updateble community build ?
Will support for the VTV chipset be mainlined to Libreelec ?
Does the TVheadend version used in the VIM2 build support both the VTV board and my external HD-star sat receiver ?
Does the lack of Mali driver support kill performance over the Android version ?
Lots of questions to help me decide on the best choice.
Having had the vim2 for a week or so at this stage I can answer my own question.
The Android version doesn’t fit my use case since it can’t run tvheadend which is essential. Neither does it have AC3 support which makes it unusable for the HDTV channels we have in our country and there seems no way over overcoming this and no intention to release a version which supports AC3.
Unfortunately Libreelec doesn’t work with the dtv boards and neither can it support spidf pass through off the dtv board or support the the remote control. These are all fundamental functionalities for a board described as a TV box
At the moment the vim2 is dead in the water for me and I am fairly disappointed in the software support offered. As far as I am concerned - for its intended function the software offered for the board is totally inadequate and the fact that there are unedited threads on the forum which state at their top that the dTV board is fully supported represents misrepresentation. At the very least any mention of Libreelec supporting dTV should be corrected so that others do not get mislead as I was.
As it stands I wish I had have bough the Mecool Ki3. The VIM2 an expensive board which I was prepared to pay for its unique features but almost none of them are supported in anything other than Android. I paid the extra because I expected better support.
