Xiaomi Mi TV Stick with Android TV Launched for as low as $29.99

Xiaomi TV Stick Remote Control

There’s been a fair amount of leaks related to Xiaomi Mi TV Stick around the web for the last few months, but the company has now finally launched their Android TV TV stick with a quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, and 8GB storage. While there were rumors about a 4K version, Xiaomi Mi TV Stick only outputs up to 1080p60, and since it runs the official Android TV OS, supports Chromecast and Google Assistant out of the box. Official Price: 39.99 Euros. But you can get it on Aliexpress for as low as $29.99 with coupon 715MITVSTICK. Xiaomi Mi TV Stick specifications: SoC- Amlogic S805Y quad-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Arm Mali-450MP GPU (Source: Twitter) System Memory – 1GB RAM Storage – 8GB storage Video Output – HDMI up to 1080p60 Video Codecs – VP9-10, H.265, H.264, VC-1, MPEG1/2/4, real 8/9/10 Audio – Via HDMI, Dolby and DTS support […]

Ugoos X4 Cube Android 9.0 TV Box Plays 4Kp120 AV1 Videos

Ugoos X4 Cube

AOMedia AV1 video codec has been in the works for several years, and has strong industry backing since it’s open-source, royalty-free and delivers compression similar or even superior to H.265. Some services like YouTube and Netflix have already started using AV1 on PCs where the CPU is powerful enough to handle software video decoding. But relying on software video decoding is not ideal on typical Arm-based devices, either because of battery life concerns (e.g. phones) or simply impossible because the processor won’t be able to cope. The latter is especially the case on TV boxes who are not usually fitted with Arm Cortex-A53 cores leaving hardware video decoding to a video processing unit (VPU). Since AV1 is still fairly new, most VPU doesn’t support the new video codec, and while we have seen several AV1 capable processors including Broadcom BCM7218x, Realtek RTD1311/RTD1319, and Amlogic S905X4. as well as at least […]

Beelink GS-King X Review – Part 1: Unboxing & Teardown

Beelink GS-King X Review

Beelink GS-King X is a 3-in-1 media center that works as an Android 9.0 TV box, a NAS with support for two 3.5″ hard drives, and a HiFi audio system with two ESS9018 audio DACs powering RCA and balanced audio outputs. The company sent a review sample, and I’ll start by checking out the hardware and accessories, show how to install the hard drive(s), and attempt to tear down the device to check what it’s really made of. Beelink GS-King X Unboxing There’s no mention of TV box nor Android on the package, just “STORAGE” and DTS plus Dolby Audio… The bottom of the package lists the Beelink GS-King X specifications which we already discussed in our previous articles. There’s a red ribbon that helps to take the device out of its package. I wish more companies would do this. Accessories include the voice remote control, an HDMI cable, a […]

GNOME Renders on Arm Mali-G31 Bifrost GPU with Fully Open Source Code

Panfrost ODROID Go Advance Black Edition

We first wrote about Panfrost open-source Arm Mali GPU driver getting initial support for Mali-G31 Bifrost GPU in late April, when engineers at Collabora managed to run some basic demos. Progress has been fast-paced as the company has now implemented support for all major features of OpenGL ES 2.0 and some features of OpenGL 2.1. That means hardware-based on Arm Mali-G31 GPU such as ODROID Go Advance (used for testing) can run Wayland compositors with zero-copy graphics, including GNOME 3, every scene in glmark2-es2 benchmarks, and some 3D games such as Neverball. All without any binary blobs. The company also claims to support hardware-accelerated video players mpv and Kodi. The way it should work is that while Panfrost driver renders the user interface, Amlogic open-source video decoder developed by BayLibre handles hardware video decoding. All changes are already included in upstream Mesa with no out-of-tree patches required, and Bifrost support […]

Linux 5.7 Released – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.7 Changelog

OK… I’m a bit late on that one. Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.7 last week: So we had a fairly calm last week, with nothing really screaming “let’s delay one more rc”. Knock wood – let’s hope we don’t have anything silly lurking this time, like the last-minute wifi regression we had in 5.6.. But embarrassing regressions last time notwithstanding, it all looks fine. And most of the discussion I’ve seen the last week or two has been about upcoming features, so the merge window is now open  and I’ll start processing pull requests tomorrow as usual. But in the meantime, please give this a whirl. We’ve got a lot of changes in 5.7 as usual (all the stats look normal – but “normal” for us obviously pretty big and means “almost 14 thousand non-merge commits all over, from close to two thousand developers”), So the appended shortlog is only […]

Beelink GS-King X Android TV Box, Dual HDD NAS & HiFi Audio System Launched for $250

buy Beelink GS-King X

Beelink GS-King X is an Android 9.0 TV box and a NAS with two 3.5″ SATA bays powered by Amlogic S922X-H processor combined with 4GB RAM and 64GB eMMC flash that was unveiled last month with some blurry renders. We now have for the details about the device, which has started to sell for $249.99 plus shipping on GeekBuying when using a “Fixed Priced” coupon, in my case 4ATAOTO6. Updated Beelink GS-King X specifications: SoC – Amlogic S922X-H hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 4x Arm Cortex A73 cores @ up to 2.2 GHz, 2x Arm Cortex A53 cores @ 1.8 GHz, Arm Mali-G52MP4 GPU @ 846MHz; 12nm process System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 RAM Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot, 2x 3.5″ SATA HDD drive bay for up to 32TB storage in total Video Output – HDMI 2.1 up to 4K @ 60 Hz with HDCP 2.2 Video – […]

Beelink GS-King X Amlogic S922X-H TV Box Comes with 3.5″ SATA Drive Bays

Beelink GS-King X

After Beelink GT-King and GT-King Pro, it appears the company is working on another Amlogic S922X(-H) TV box with Beelink GS-King X providing two internal 3.5″ SATA Bays. [Update May 14th: The post has been updated to reflect two SATA bays are available, not only one] Beelink GS-King X (preliminary) specification: SoC – Amlogic S922X-H hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 4x Arm Cortex A73 cores @ up to 1.8 GHz, 2x Arm Cortex A53 cores @ 1.9 GHz, Arm Mali-G52MP4 GPU @ 846MHz; 12nm manufacturing process System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 RAM Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot, 2x 3.5″ SATA HDD drive bay for up to 16TB storage Video Output – HDMI 2.1 up to 4K @ 60 Hz with HDCP 2.2 Video – AVE-10 engine with 4K UHD H.265/VP9/AVS2 video decoding up to 60 fps, Dolby Vision, Advanced HDR10, HDR10+, HLG, and PRIME HDR high-dynamic range support […]

Raspberry Pi 4 vs ODROID-C4 Features Comparison

ODROID-C4 vs Raspberry Pi 4

Yesterday, Hardkernel launched ODROID-C4 Amlogic S905X3 SBC as an update to ODROID-C2 SBC launched in 2016. We’ve seen the board can compete with Raspberry Pi 4 4GB board thanks to benchmarks released by Hardkernel, but since those boards are so versatile, meaning they can be used in a variety of applications, it’s impossible to benchmark all use cases. One way to find out which board might be right for your application without going through benchmarks is to look at a list of features for each, and that’s exactly what we’ve done in this post. Let’s get straight to the Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB RAM) vs ODROID-C4 comparison table. Features/Specs Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB) ODROID-C4 Release date 24th June 2019 23rd April 2020 SoC Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 @ 1.5 GHz (overclockable to 2.0+ GHz) with NEON, FPU Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ 2.0 GHz with NEON, FPU, Armv8 Crypto […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC