[davilla]

There is nothing impressive about playing 1080p videos in 2013.

The real question is can it run the XBMC gui, update library etc smoothly. Can you run an attractive skin without lagging badly.

Sadly, it is impressive when faced with the challenge of finding a free and open source solution that doesn't have NDAs and works on multiple deices in a heavily fragmented Android and/or ARM world. In theory it shouldn't be this hard to get hardware video decoding working with XBMC on most, if not all, devices such as this. A lack of standards between chip makers, a lack of a standard API from Google/Android, chipmakers thinking that a private API that requires an NDA is a good idea, and other factors, make playing 1080p in 2013 on an ARM device an uphill battle.

This is exactly why Pivos decided to work with AmLogic. Pivos could expose large portions of software code without having to play the source code shell game. This was specifically so Pivos could provide Linux based solutions as well as Android ones. But people keep forgetting this when buying off brand AmLogic boxes where there are small yet important differences in the firmware or even the hardware and the Pivos solution does not quite work right.