2014-03-23, 10:27
I brought the box from amazon mainly for their official streaming platform icntv (which has a ton of tv shows and movies). XMBC wasn't much of a consideration since I already got a nice xbmc setup with a htpc. So imagine my disappointment right after I got it setup and I was greeted with a blue screen displaying an error message stating that it's unable to authenticate with its backend server. (apparently icntv had stopped authenticating non-china based boxes just one week back.) The worse part is that this error renders the box completely unusable as it blocks any access to the rest of the andriod system.
I was kinda mad that xiaome would sell such a box on Amazon to US consumers and yet stopped supporting the box outside of china. So I rooted the thing and installed 3rd party stream clients which got around the issue. And since then I was able to install any APK on the box so I figured to give XMBC a try. And to my surprise after installing the latest gotham beta release I found out that it's almost a perfect XBMC box sans the GUI which only supports 720p (1gb of ram not enough for the confluence theme?). It plays the killer clip (1080p bbc great plain) without a hitch with no audio sync issue that's been reported. As matter of fact I think it renders the scene better than my htpc setup (nvidia gtx 750). And it's quiter than my main htpc! Obviously the UI feels a bit sluggish comparing to my pc but man for box that sells for less than 100 bucks it's great!
I'd like to thank and congratulate the xbmc developers on being able to get the amlogic hw acceleration on par with the rest of the platforms. A great job! I didn't have to do any tweak to get a great little xbmc box.
Thanks guys!
I was kinda mad that xiaome would sell such a box on Amazon to US consumers and yet stopped supporting the box outside of china. So I rooted the thing and installed 3rd party stream clients which got around the issue. And since then I was able to install any APK on the box so I figured to give XMBC a try. And to my surprise after installing the latest gotham beta release I found out that it's almost a perfect XBMC box sans the GUI which only supports 720p (1gb of ram not enough for the confluence theme?). It plays the killer clip (1080p bbc great plain) without a hitch with no audio sync issue that's been reported. As matter of fact I think it renders the scene better than my htpc setup (nvidia gtx 750). And it's quiter than my main htpc! Obviously the UI feels a bit sluggish comparing to my pc but man for box that sells for less than 100 bucks it's great!
I'd like to thank and congratulate the xbmc developers on being able to get the amlogic hw acceleration on par with the rest of the platforms. A great job! I didn't have to do any tweak to get a great little xbmc box.
Thanks guys!