If you've got experience with both SBC please share your thoughts. Pros/Cons.  

 

I would like to replace my RPI based HTPC. 

I am going to call the K2 I have a "close enough" to C2 board (both are Amlogic gxb dev boards in Pi form factor).

 

I would say that today, right this second that the switch would not be a great one in the case of either board.  That said, I only support/work with mainline kernels, and an RFC patchset has just been submitted for review to enable the video decoder hardware.  With that and the Mali driver you'd have a superior solution to the RPi in either case, hands down.  

 

As to the board vs board situation:

 

Le potato is lacking GbE, wifi.  It is, however, not incredibly expensive and has quite impressive memory performance compared to the C2. (Benchmarking thread has details).  That will be important for 4k video.

 

The C2 is the only Amlogic based device on the market that does not lie about it's current clock speed.  This has to do with some ugly history and past claims of "2.0 GHz" operation.  There is a whole thread here somewhere talking about clockspeed cheating.  As an HTPC that's not as important, and RPi is guilty of it as well, if not even worse depending on the board.

 

With the hardware support in mainline maturing so quickly, I'd guess the Amlogic devices will be a good bet for that use case very soon.  If you want wifi and GbE you'll want a C2/K2, if you want faster memory for potentially smoother playback go Le Potato.

 

@TonyMac32 Thank you very much for sharing.   I didn't know about memory performance that is a very useful information.  

 

I'm glad to hear that mainline support is maturing. As far as I can see there are some vendor's patches available for hw accel. LibreELEC has promised some preliminary support for hw accel, If I got it right. 

 

K2 is a nice option

I answered on my phone earlier, thread with benchmark: 

 

@TonyMac32 Thanks a lot. 

 

NanoPi seems like a most "available" option for me now (aliexpress) but I tend to choose Le Potato so far. 

I'm hoping it is cleared up soon, but so far I haven't been able to get strange green static out of my video on the K2.  Another thing to think about.  @balbes150 I haven't spent a lot of time on the K2 video "static", is disabling cvbs entirely the way to stop that?

13 hours ago, Igor_K said:

NanoPi seems like a most "available" option for me now (aliexpress)

 

Aliexpress and FriendlyELEC? Usually not a good idea unless you want to pay more for no reason: https://aliexpress.com/item/NanoPi-K2-Development-Board-Quad-core-Cortex-A53-1-5GHz-WiFi-Bluetooth-USB-Cable-RC100-Remote/32813030887.html vs. 

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=186

 

Those Amlogic SoCs support ABFC so 'raw' memory bandwidth is not that much of an issue. Another comparison between S905 and S905X: http://www.stane1983.com/index.php/2017/08/18/some-thoughts-on-amlogic-part-2/

 

In case it's not known already: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/kodi/attachments/slides/2166/export/events/attachments/kodi/slides/2166/FOSDEM_Presentation_2018___Lukas_Rusak.pdf

@tkaiser It turned out that friendlyarm does not ship to Russia anymore.   The lowest price on Aliexpress is US $56.98