Odroid-N2 as network player

Hardware

Hardkernel's Odroid-N2 seems to me to be prepared for the foreseeable future. About twice the size and slightly more expensive than the Raspi, the N2 is equipped with a reasonable power connection (no USB), Gigabit LAN, Wake on LAN (WOL) and two memory card slots. Besides µSD you can also install the system on an eMMC module and get a nice speed boost. More about this later.

Software

The Odroid-N2 has only been on the market since the beginning of 2019 and has since been fully supported by a few Linux distributions. On the Raspberry Pi I had Libreelec running with Kodi. The sister project Coreelec is better suited for Hardkernel's Odroids because it specializes in Amlogic hardware and supports the stable version 9.0.3 of N2 since July 2019. Kodi is also on board, of course.

I found it no trouble to get the installation done: You get the image on coreelec.org after a selection dialog for the used platform. Etcher writes the downloaded image directly to the memory card. You don't have to do anything else to get a running system.

Detours to the eMMC

A µSD adapter is supplied together with the eMMC module. So it should be possible to write the image of Coreelec directly to the eMMC module with the PC. Mine was not recognized on the PC, so I took a different path. I had to get a µSD card from the drawer: If you write the image on the µSD card and insert it instead of the eMMC into the N2, the board boots from the µSD. Now you can log in via ssh on the command line.

ssh root@192.168.x.x
user: root
password: coreelec

The switch for selecting the boot medium is located in the middle of the case. The switch must be on the right side so that the board boots from one of the memory cards. If the switch is on the left, an internal 8 MiB SPI flash memory is searched for the bootloader. This function is not needed for the media center, it is intended for future BIOS implementations.

After logging in to the new system, run the supplied program installtoemmc and have the eMMC card ready. Since it is not possible to boot the system from the µSD card while the eMMC card is inserted, the N2 will be shut down from installtoemmc first. Then you have 30 seconds time to press the card on the board before the system restarts and copies the system to the card. All data will be overwritten. The N2 can then boot from the fast eMMC module. In no time the Kodi interface is available.

Now you only need to load the Kodi-Backup from the old system, if you have created one and make device-specific settings, e.g. Audio output or arm the Wake on LAN function. If WoL is activated and the device has gone to sleep after the set time, it is sufficient to reactivate the N2 with a wake-up call from the Smartphone App (Kodi Remote or similar). Within seconds the system can be used again. There are two LEDs on the board. The blue one is preset to show a pulsating heartbeat as long as the operating system is running. A flashing LED disturbs me. You can switch it off e.g. by the following line in the file /storage/.config/autostart.sh:

echo none > /sys/class/leds/blue:heartbeat/trigger

cat /sys/class/leds/blue:heartbeat/trigger

Update 9.2.4

The before mentioned LED setting can be done in KODI UI. Version 9.2.4 supports latest Odroid N2plus, fixes issues with update notification and playback of h264, settings for CEC versions for compatibility reasons. More new features and fixed bugs can be found on CoreELEC discussion thread or homepage.

Result

Two weeks of living room use have shown that the investment was worthwhile. The responsiveness of the user interface is fun, the circuit board hardly gets warm, the system has never crashed and the power-saving standby mode makes you feel good. Even Amazon Prime Video now works with Kodi. On the Raspberry Pi the registration doesn't even work.

Translated with the help of www.DeepL.com/Translator