Android TV Boxes - Moved on?

[Chubbs]

Hi

A friend at work said he's seen $ky working on an Android TV box - no satellite at all, I've seen there are some ways of watching sport in the past but he said it seemed to be the full package.

I've had an F5S and that was okay for a while but this capability seemed to good to be true, I'm not asking how just has anyone else seen this development in action?

Thanks for reading

Chubbs

[DJ OD]

Yea.

Many solutions now. Iptv compatible boxes, plex clients and other re-streamers.


DJ OD

[DejaVu]

TV suppliers are not moving fast enough.

HD streaming is a walk in the park with internet speeds as they are these days.

Satellite and Cable is becoming old technology.

[Ashley]

Navi-x etc have links

[Chubbs]

Sincere thanks all, I've an unopened Amazon Fire TV, found an emulator guide - best have a play around with this as well then!

[trueblue924]

Sincere thanks all, I've an unopened Amazon Fire TV, found an emulator guide - best have a play around with this as well then!

i got a uk one and it cant be rooted can you still run emulators by sideloading

[Geko]

Plex is one of the easiest solutions.

There are also XBMC solutions.

It's how I've been watching the footy this year.

[Mr.James]

Openelec XBMC running on a raspberry pi will do it for under £40.

[Mystical_2K]

Openelec XBMC running on a raspberry pi will do it for under £40.

true but once you load a shit load of media (1000+ films, a few hundred tv shows etc.) the pi cant handle it and slows down to a crawl.
im looking for something a bit quicker now without having to have a revo or similar setup

[Mr.James]

true but once you load a shit load of media (1000+ films, a few hundred tv shows etc.) the pi cant handle it and slows down to a crawl.
im looking for something a bit quicker now without having to have a revo or similar setup

I don't have any issues with mine but I've done a fair bit of optimisation to be fair.

I've got the storage partition on a USB3 stick (negligible increase over USB2 but for a few quid price difference I thought why the hell not). The SQL DB runs on a VM on my NAS. It's overclocked to about 900mhz. All the films are stored on a NAS so it doesn't have to deal with USB access. It's using NFS (over Samba) and my mounts have their buffers ramped up to max for better throughput. All my movies are in separate folders so that it doesn't have to parse every single file when it checks if subtitles are available... I've also setup XBMC in a VM on my server so that does all the library scanning and artwork/info scraping.

Only thing it struggles with is DTS-HD as it can't hardware decode it and the CPU isn't man enough... I've been looking at Android boxes but none support HDMI-CEC that I know of and that will really annoy the Mrs. He won't run into any of those issues though if he's only wanting it for streaming TV.

[Geko]

A Now TV box running Plex does the job for a tenner

[Larrylakes]

I've done the XBMC thing everything seems to be getting closed. I'm all over the plex now, either get a now tv or if you have a Sammy TV you can get an app.

[Gazzr]

I've just discovered XBMC and am now on the brink of buying an amazon fire tv for the living room as i've read some good reviews of using this for the job. Thought i'd pop on here and do a bit of research and noticed this:

A Now TV box running Plex does the job for a tenner

Should this be the route i take, or is the fire tv still worth the additional cost?

[satzzz]

No XBMC on Nowtv box

[Mystical_2K]

I don't have any issues with mine but I've done a fair bit of optimisation to be fair.

I've got the storage partition on a USB3 stick (negligible increase over USB2 but for a few quid price difference I thought why the hell not). The SQL DB runs on a VM on my NAS. It's overclocked to about 900mhz. All the films are stored on a NAS so it doesn't have to deal with USB access. It's using NFS (over Samba) and my mounts have their buffers ramped up to max for better throughput. All my movies are in separate folders so that it doesn't have to parse every single file when it checks if subtitles are available... I've also setup XBMC in a VM on my server so that does all the library scanning and artwork/info scraping.

Only thing it struggles with is DTS-HD as it can't hardware decode it and the CPU isn't man enough... I've been looking at Android boxes but none support HDMI-CEC that I know of and that will really annoy the Mrs. He won't run into any of those issues though if he's only wanting it for streaming TV.

to be fair i didnt do any optimisations but i have a similar setup to yourself with 3x NAS microservers with all the media on and a MYSQL database for the shared library, im not saying the Pi is unusable but compared to a PC running openElec the difference is noticeable in my opinion, plus you cant use any advanced skins as they will also kill the Pi dead

[Fergie73]

have a mygica atv582 quad core box, with genesis running

superb quality of fims and tv, solid and reliable

[Geko]

I've just discovered XBMC and am now on the brink of buying an amazon fire tv for the living room as i've read some good reviews of using this for the job. Thought i'd pop on here and do a bit of research and noticed this:

Should this be the route i take, or is the fire tv still worth the additional cost?

Depends if you want to make the switch from XBMC to plex. Most of us here have. Mainly because of the ease of sharing media using plex.

[{{909}}]

steering the thread slightly off course, but what the hell...

whats the best way (not the cheapest) to run xbmc/plex these days? I wanna add a new telly and media player in the spare room and have a Revo in the living room at the moment which I love but it could be faster. I have a 3ghz core2duo and matx motherboard spare, so I could build something with that. Would it be worthwhile over just spending less on a cheap android box?

[Geko]

You can run Plex on your smart TV, as a client. But you'll need something more beefy for a server if you want to stream your own media. If you connect to someone elses server, no problems with just having the lightweight client.

[tronads]

Anyone here ordered the new "Open Hour" yet ?