New 2023 onward AVRs with HDMI 2.1 - Media Player users beware!

[MidiMagic]

Another case where business put intellectual property and greed over compatibility.

There is a special place in hades for people who do this. Everything they try to do is incompatible.

 

[ar surround]

Another case where business put intellectual property and greed over compatibility.

There is a special place in hades for people who do this. Everything they try to do is incompatible.

I'm laughing at your comment because Paramount+ (with Showtime) sold the rights to Homeland and just pulled it from their streaming service without any warning. My wife and I were in the middle of season 4 of 9 when they pulled it. So I wrote on the QQ Streaming and Content thread that, "All of these streaming companies and the people who operate them can go to hell."

Talk about greed. But we QQ people are a nasty lot and have ways to get even.
[Edit: I forgot to mention that there are 37 copies of that series and season in our public library system. Ha ha.]

 

[letting1]

I'm planning to update my system to include a Kodi media player on a NUC and a new Marantz Cinema 70S using its pre-out capabilities. There's a NUC8BEK Mini PC i3-8109U/8GB RAM/120GB SSD/ WIN10 on eBay that I have my eye on. Given the discussion above and the need to update the NUC8's HDMI to allow HD audio pass through, should I go for this NUC8 or should I look for a newer version. Also, if I do go for this NUC8, is the BEK version compatible with the setup recommended by @HomerJAU?

 

[HomerJAU]

An Intel NUC 8 BEK or BEH is fine for Kodi. It’s just needs the HDMI firmware updated for latest AVRs with HDMI 2.1. This will do all audio formats you need for music you see here on QQ and video up 4K with HDR (no Dolby Vision).

I still have 3 x Intel 8 i3 NUCs here (one I recently loaned to a friend). I use LibreElec (Linux with Kodi included) not Windows. Someone here in AU was selling 45 of them (second hand memory and SSD but no Win) for under $200 ea.

EDIT: I would recommend LibreElec over Windows as it boots much faster and is not constantly running windows services in the background and installing windows updates etc. If all you plan to do is use the NUC as Player then I can provide you with a smallish backup file to install LE and have it mostly configured ready to go.

If you don’t have the HDMI firmware update let me know.

I also have an Intel NUC11 Pro TNK and a NUC12 Pro WSH but there is no difference in performance playing music or video but both have 2.5GBE Ethernet vs 1GBE on NUC 8 models but you need a 2.5GBE network to see the speed increase for file transfer. NUC 12 and NUC 13 have a video sync bug so don’t go there yet (only at 24Hz which is not that common), although there is a workaround (code hack).