Best Android tv box for Kodi

The current best Android Box on the market and by big margin(in my mind & a general consensus),is the Nvidia Shield TV.

It's very well supported and always being enhanced via updates.

It's very User,Wife,Kids friendly.

It's almost streaming overkill,but superb in that department.

It's a multitasking gaming beast too,cloud based servers,local,etc,etc

It's a very well packaged,supported,built device and the likes of SPMC are
being developed specifically on the Shield and for the Shield(as in Shield specific tweaks & tricks).All good for
a mid-priced Device £149.99 16GB Model(expandable storage). Amazon often do excellent deals on it,with savings of up to €50.

And no I don't work for Nvidia hehe

Bebop wrote: »

I bought this from Amazon;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01CXL416W/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It's a media box kit with Raspberry Pi 3 and Kodi installed on the 16GB SD card all for £50 sterling, shipped free to the UK, It works fine for me

Is that Android ?

eamonnq wrote: »

Is that Android ?

no, would be running LibreELEC, a stripped down version of linux designed from the ground up specifically for KODI, they call it a JeOS (Just enough OS) for what you want to do with it, which in this case is KODI.

if you really don't want to roll your own, it'll save you some hassle, but the chances are, you already have a microSD card and a 5V 2A microusb psu (or power it from your telly if you can) and you can pick up a case from about 2 quid if you don't mind waiting.

the barebones pi3b itself is about 29 pounds delivered, and it takes 15 minutes to get libreELEC up and runnning on it, and i find that doing these things yourself will very much stand to you if/when it goes wrong as you'll be that much more familiar with how the thing works, so i guess it depends what you're looking for, some people like to tinker, others just want to plug it in and have it work out of the box.

also, if you're looking for a fruity named dev board to run KODI, your best bet right now is the Odroid C2, it's only marginally more expensive than the Pi3 and kicks the Pi's a$$ all day long as it's about the same spec as most of the current android TV boxes with a quad core 2ghz cpu, a mali-450 gpu and does all the 4k shenanigans that you can't do on a pi3.

2GHz quad core Cortex A53 processor (Pi 3 is clocked at 1.2 GHz)
Mali-450 GPU (Pi 3 has a VideoCore IV 3D GPU)
2 GB RAM (Pi 3 has 1 GB)
Gigabit Ethernet (Pi 3 has 10/100)
4K video support (Pi 3 supports HD... drivers/support are sometimes better for Pi though)
eMMC slot (Pi 3 doesn't offer this option)
UHS-1 clocked microSD card slot (Pi 3 requires overclock to get this speed)
Official (or semi-official) images for Ubuntu 16.04 MATE, LibreELEC and Android (Pi 3 also uses LibreELEC and Raspbian, a Debian fork)

it also has some of the KODI devs working very closely with it directly, so it's well supported.

I also love the shield TV because it's shiny and awesome, but right now for streaming and kodi purposes it's like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, totally overkill and will likely stay the defacto yardstick for the next 1-2 years, although Xiaomi are about to bring out their own version of it, so watch this space.