If you’re not simply watching movie streamed from the Internet, one way to store your media files is in a NAS, and another way is to store directly into your media player with an Hard drive. Unless you run a SAMBA or NFS server within your media player, you may lose the ability to access your files from several devices, but by playing directly from the hard drive, you are sure any video will be played smoothly. There are few low cost set-top box that support SATA, and the ones that do, such as Mele A1000 and its successors, simply offer an external SATA connector leaving your hard drive without protection from dust. I’ve just noticed there’s a low cost solution with an internal HDD enclosure thanks to an Android set-top box powered by Amlogic AML8726-M3 called either JW-11 or Slav, and maybe some other names I’ve missed.
Here are the specifications of the device:
- SoC – AMLogic AML8726-M3 CPU + Mali-400 GPU
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3
- Storage – 4GB NAND FLASH + SATA + micro SD card slot
- Video Output – HDMI 1.4 + AV
- Audio Output – HDMI, sterea RCA and coaxial SPDIF
- Video Codecs – HD MPEG1/2/4,H.264, HD AVC/VC-1,RM/RMVB,Xvid/DivX3/4/5/6 ,RealVideo8/9/10
- Video Container Formats – Avi/Rm/Rmvb/Ts/Vob/Mkv/Mov/ISO/wmv/asf/flv/dat/mpg/mpeg
- Audio Codecs/Formats – MP3/WMA/AAC/WAV/OGG/AC3/DDP/TrueHD/DTS/DTS/HD/FLAC/APE
- USB – 4x High speed USB 2.0
- Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet + Wi-Fi
- Power Supply – DC 5V/2A
The device runs Android 4.0 or 4.1, or Linux depending on the version, and supports FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file systems. You’d just insert the 2.5″ hard drive in the device just like you would do in a laptop.
You can purchase JW-11 media player on Aliexpress for $57.50 excluding shipping, or G-Box Slav for $69 on Amazon
Via AndroidPC.es
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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And there’s another one called HiMedia Q5, although the harddrive is not completly hidden – http://www.amazon.com/HiMedia-Android-1080P-Network-Player/dp/B009O82ANO
A dual version “HiMedia Q5 II” is coming too: http://www.himedia-tech.cn/product_show.php?id=52
sorry balked and didnt go. hope you had a fun day
@x
That was OK, but just a few interesting sessions. I actually left a little early.
Seems like quite a good deal. Apart from SATA, some people will be happy to see those old style coaxial AV ports too 🙂
But not so fast processor right (single core etc)? And does it support more conventional linux flavours?
@onebir
It seems nobody has bothered to run a desktop Linux distribution on AMLogic SoCs, only Linux + XBMC.
Back to the Cubieboard…