[Smiff]

well that's a bit of an advert really ^. No offence haven't heard of WeTek but at least your box looks different and CM is a nice idea too.

Anyway I have heard there's at least one dev (Kerber?) with the CX-S806 providing OpenELEC builds. but i'm more interested in Android updates myself. latest firmware i could find was December 2014, haven't tried an update as i'm not sure if i have any issues with the stock AND not sure if i'm keeping the box.

I had assumed the S812 would be well supported by Kodi, anyone have any specific info on the crash issue i found with 14.1 on this box, or just use 15 alpha and assume 15.x final will support it well?

[Ned Scott]

Not really an advertisement. Their S805 ROM really is nice, and they don't make any S805 products to sell people.

[Smiff]

Ok sorry but back on topic, the O-droid is an S805 dev board, something like a Ras Pi? for people who want to do.. er geeky stuff.
http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/...&tab_idx=2

the CX-S806 is a consumer product with faster CPU (A9) but no gigabit ethernet and of course way less customizability. It's for anyone wanting a fast cheap box right now. Alternatives would like the Eny M8S/M8C in UK.

they aren't really comparable at all?

the S812-H boxes are £100 to £120 so not really comparable, that's in a whole diff price bracket you could look at Chromeboxes, small form factor PCs etc.

If anyone has used Kodi on the CX-S806 (either Android or OpenELEC) be interested to know how it went. I should probably have just got another Cyclone X4 but wanted the optical out, faster CPU and 2GB RAM for the future. for me it was £60 for S806 vs £40 for the Sumvision. O-droid looks cheap too but when you've added other bits, not cheaper than other S805 boxes? Depends what you want to do, i just want Kodi to run well.

[RaVeNV1]

Could you please test this box with HEVC files w/ Kodi 15/Isengard?

How well does Kodi perform on this box in general?

[wrxtasy]

I can tell you as an owner of an S805 ODROID-C1, 1080p HEVC files play very well when using Kodi Isengard Alpha2 running on an Ubuntu 14.04 OS image. You are able to set this up to boot straight into Kodi Isengard, just like a OpenElec distro.

SPMC and Kodi Isengard running on Android 4.4.2 are not reliable at all for decoding all HEVC files I have come across.
The Ubuntu / Kodi Isengard Alpha2 combo is 100% reliable.

It is no harder to flash a Ubuntu / Android / OpenElec image to a SD card with the ODROID-C1 than doing the same thing with a RPi2. Its the same process.

[Aeronaut]

Hi! Is there a way to get Ubuntu 14.04 working on S812 devices like the CX-S806, the M8S or the MXIII-G??

What i'm asking myself is, why the ODODID-C1 (S805!?) and MXIII-G have Gigabit MAC and most other S812 do not... Is this driver or hardware related?
What about flashing MXIII-G Firmware on a M8S?

[noggin]

Hi! Is there a way to get Ubuntu 14.04 working on S812 devices like the CX-S806, the M8S or the MXIII-G??

What i'm asking myself is, why the ODODID-C1 (S805!?) and MXIII-G have Gigabit MAC and most other S812 do not... Is this driver or hardware related?
What about flashing MXIII-G Firmware on a M8S?

Isn't the PHY (i.e. the physical hardware interface) for Gigabit Ethernet different to that for 10/100Mbs? I don't think it's as simple as just updating firmware... Suspect it is a hardware issue.

I suspect other boxes have gone for a cheaper 10/100Mbs PHY to save money - as GigE isn't required for media playback of real world content (though is useful if you also run your box as a file server or TV Headend server)

[Lordfernnado]

Hi!
I bought an MXIII-G box, With s812 chip, is there anywher a guide to install either openelec or a xbmc linux on it.
I got 3 files a .tar a .zip and an update .zip.
I know how to use the recovery mode, but i don' reaaly understand if it can be done on sdcard and how?

Thanks a lot!

[camos]

Kerber's OpenELEC ports (forked from Codesnake's work) for S802/S805/S812 devices (including CX-S806S) are working extremely well and overcome most if not all of the drawbacks of Kodi under Android. The latest builds are based on OpenELEC 5.0/Kodi 14.0 and include hardware accelerated decoding of HEVC content.

Sources
Downloads
Discussion

Hopefully this is not too much of a ramble.
I am interested in flashing OpenELEC to replace Android on my M8S BCM 4335 box. I'm totally inexperienced with this but have been doing a lot of research on how to go about it. It doesn't seem to be particularly difficult as per this FreakTab discussion. Except, of course, for the number of more experienced people who are having problems doing it. The post referenced is not about flashing OpenELEC but rather restoring a broken Android. Later on in the thread someone successfully installed OpenELEC but their method was less clear to me and seemed to require some fiddling.

So, finally a question.
Is this install straightforward and can it be done using the method described in the linked post?
I tried to go to the discussion linked in the bobones post but the page would not load for me.

Can someone help me sort out how to go about flashing OpenELEC to my M8S?

Cheers,
Clive

[Stephen_brig]

Kerber's OpenELEC ports (forked from Codesnake's work) for S802/S805/S812 devices (including CX-S806S) are working extremely well and overcome most if not all of the drawbacks of Kodi under Android. The latest builds are based on OpenELEC 5.0/Kodi 14.0 and include hardware accelerated decoding of HEVC content.

Sources
Downloads
Discussion

Hopefully this is not too much of a ramble.
I am interested in flashing OpenELEC to replace Android on my M8S BCM 4335 box. I'm totally inexperienced with this but have been doing a lot of research on how to go about it. It doesn't seem to be particularly difficult as per this FreakTab discussion. Except, of course, for the number of more experienced people who are having problems doing it. The post referenced is not about flashing OpenELEC but rather restoring a broken Android. Later on in the thread someone successfully installed OpenELEC but their method was less clear to me and seemed to require some fiddling.

So, finally a question.
Is this install straightforward and can it be done using the method described in the linked post?
I tried to go to the discussion linked in the bobones post but the page would not load for me.

Can someone help me sort out how to go about flashing OpenELEC to my M8S?

Cheers,
Clive

The bootloader is fairly much locked down on the newer Firmwares on the M8S boxes. This means that trying to boot into recovery with an Openelec Zip file on an SD card is rejected as not been properly signed. There is no way round this until some one issues zip file with fake signatures (very unlikely to ever happen). The second option is to try to use an .img file and burn it to the box over USB cable using a version of USBBurnerTool issued by Amlogic. The issue with this is that the Burn tool also checks signatures and will similarly refuse to burn an Openelec img file. I have tried about five versions of the burn tool in trying to burn a WETEK openelec img file to my box, and none of them worked. It maybe that some of the earlier versions of the burn tool don't have this signature checking.
So the two obvious answers are dead ends and it is extremely unlikely that anyone will go the extra mile to make fake signed firmwares for Openelec.

I have all but given up on trying to get Openelec onto my box, I think its a lost cause. These new Firmwares seem to be a recent development to close down the option of sideloading firmwares onto these boxes and no one is either trying or can break the bootloader.

However there is a ray of sunshine in the gloom as in my various investigations I discovered that WETEK have produced a version of Kodi 15.2 which is optimized to use on their Android based S812 Core box and this would seem to work on all S812 carrying boxes. This offered a significant performance boost to my system and allows for full Amlogic codec hardware decoding. I believe it uses native frame switching by default. The only residual issue I have faced is that using the AV output on the box makes the picture massively blown up and only shows the upper right hand corner. It seems this is a deep bug in the Amlogic Codec implememtation on these boxes and is unlikely to be resolved as there are so few people still using AV output on these boxes (the WETEK Core doesn't even support AV out in hardware). I have to switch off Amlogic codec to get a correctly dimensioned picture - but the performance is still better than any of the other versions of Kodi/XBMC I tried.

I would still dearly love to get Openelec working on my box - but I am no longer going to stress it.

Stephen