Hathor

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Nov 25, 2017
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Can i put LibreElec on the iMXQPro Mini?
I hear LibreElec is good if you only want to use Kodi, which is what I want...
I do not have interests in Android so much.

EDIT: Am I better off getting the iMXQPro (MXQ Pro)?

I will be using it for 1080p Kodi
 

Nigelar

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Feb 26, 2015
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Both the machines you mention are single boot android machines. Nothing wrong with that, I have found android perfectly satisfactory for Kodi. Others prefer librelec

You would be better off buying one of the dual boot machines (android and librelec) rather than taking the risk of replacing android on a machine with a different os (librelec). Look at the new dbx t8 se, and take advantage of the Black Friday offer price.
If you are knowledgeable about installing a new os yourself then you would be better served getting a cheap Raspberry pi and loading Librelec (or Openelec) on that.
 
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Hathor

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Nov 25, 2017
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Both the machines you mention are single boot android machines. Nothing wrong with that, I have found android perfectly satisfactory for Kodi. Others prefer librelec

You would be better off buying one of the dual boot machines (android and librelec) rather than taking the risk of replacing android on a machine with a different os (librelec). Look at the new dbx t8 se, and take advantage of the Black Friday offer price.
If you are knowledgeable about installing a new os yourself then you would be better served getting a cheap Raspberry pi and loading Librelec (or Openelec) on that.
Thanks for the reply, the T8 SE is a bit out of my budget actually, I was hoping to install LibreElec myself but if that is not possible then hopefuly Kodi will run fine on Android.

EDIT: Do you think a RPI3 will run LibreElec better than the iMXQPro mini will run Kodi? I originally wanted a ODROID c2 but they are out of stock unfortunately.
 

8bitDev

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Jul 2, 2015
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Can i put LibreElec on the iMXQPro Mini?
I hear LibreElec is good if you only want to use Kodi, which is what I want...
I do not have interests in Android so much.

EDIT: Am I better off getting the iMXQPro (MXQ Pro)?

I will be using it for 1080p Kodi
Hi

Loading LibreELEC or any firmware outside of ours is not possible and it will break the box.
Usually devices that come with dualboot will have both android + LibreELEC while other arm based boxes usually come with android only.

Sometimes we do run LibreELEC only devices ,they come in limited quantities and we do not have any at the moment,so stay tuned and check the blog post for future announcements .

Depending on your user case scenario,android can do just fine.

Feel free to let us know why you prefer LibreELEC only so we could see if android may just do the same for you or LibreELEC is only right choice to go with?

Regards and have a nice day ;)
 

Bar

New Member
Aug 1, 2017
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AlexELEC works fine on my Droidbox imxq pro v2 / T2 and an old M8S box I have lying around. AlexELEC runs from SD Card so you have to boot with toothpic but when in AlexELEC, you can reboot to Android / IPTV / Gaming Emulator or AlexELEC. Beauty of running from SDCard is if you cannot wait forever on a Droidbox firmware update, you can get the latest distro with the latest Kodi version by downloading it onto SD Card.

If you want to revert to Droidbox firmware, simply remove SD Card and all is back to how it was, as nothing is written to internal memory, your warranty is intact ;

The links in Youtube video may not be updated so I've provided the latest ones below.

As always, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! and at least make a backup of original Droidbox ROM before running any custom distro's

Youtube Tutorial:
Code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87xrhTzEGoY

AlexELEC Distro's
Code:
https://github.com/AlexELEC/AlexELEC-AML/releases
 

ChrisM

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Jul 15, 2014
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ChrisMerriman.com
Interesting info. @Bar Have you got a link/guide for making a backup of fw, TWRP for those three chipsets?

I've split of this reply into a new thread at https://www.droidboxforums.com/threads/alexelec-thread.11996/ , may as well get it a new thread title in the general discussion area, get some more foot traffic to it there hopefully.

The M8-S box - is that a DroidBOX one, if so let me know the DroidBOX name and I'll add it in the main thread.

I've not included the T2 in the new thread, as the one I can find online has a Rockchip SoC, I take it it wasn't a RK3229 powering your T2, does it have another name in our range maybe?
 
Last edited:

Bar

New Member
Aug 1, 2017
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Sorry, I don't have a guide as such, I just played about with my mxq pro v2 with a few twrp's I had lying on hard disk and one of them booted up the box and let me make a backup. Easy enough, run twrp from toothpic then when it boots, select backup (by default it selects boot data syatem partitons) and choose usb otg or sd or internal to backup.

unsure of the T2 model as it was bought 2nd hand and was really laggy, may have been a clone??? who knows. Can't find it in droidbox shop, sold it on now (

The M8S is a generic chinese box with the s812 soc but, as you've sussed, AlexELEC will run on any armlogic chips.

Outside of Kodi you can reboot to IPTV app, Nintendo games emulator or reboot to droid.

I'm not a programmer but I got fed up waiting for Droidbox updates as the imxq pro v2 has dual boot with LibreElec and it looks like some of the LibreELEC update functions have been coded out of the installation so you can't update via system settings / updates. have worked out that I can download the tar files for the current build then connect to LibreElec via Samba to drop the tar file in the updates folder. Again, work in progress and don't really care if I break the box as I have original ROM backup.
 

ChrisM

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Jul 15, 2014
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ChrisMerriman.com
S802 (other than the iMX6, oldest Amlogic models we sold) and S912 (newest) aren't compatible (just for future readers of this thread).
Re LibreELEC patches via update folder, works fine IF the update is compatible. I know it has been used for beta testing model-specific patches prior to OTA release etc previously, but I think the only times I've read about generic (straight from LibreELEC) patches being put on, the result was a softbrick.
Thanks for the info, looking forward to having a play with it when time allows.
 

Bar

New Member
Aug 1, 2017
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yes, totally. It is risky, if tar is uncompatable, Libre does stop install to protect current installation unless you run “touch /storage/.update/.nocompat” to override the CPU arch check in the update process else it detects a mismatch and aborts. If you run it and it's wrong, bricked and a ROM recovery or installtonand if you want a working system again.

I'm unsubscribing from this topic now and will keep an eye on other thread but I can only play around with S812 / S905x SoC's. Spent days on this just to get a try of Kodi 17.6 / 18 and the wife's getting a bit fed up now ;