That’s the beginning of the new giveaway week that will take place between on March 9 – 15, with one device given away every day. I’ll start with a bang with Nagrace HPH-NTV6, an Android TV box powered by Rockchip RK3288 SoC with 4GB RAM and 32GB Flash. In my initial HPH NT-V6 review, I found the device to have very good performance, but at the time XBMC support was rather weak on RK3288, and the device had serious Ethernet issues. Since then XBMC / Kodi / SPMC has greatly improves, and the company recently released a new firmware that fixes the critical Ethernet performance bug, so in 2015 it has become a much better device. There’s also a Ubuntu / Android dual boot image. You can check out HPH NT-V6 unboxing post for more pictures. To enter the draw simply leave a comment below. Other rules are as follows: […]
ARM Releases Kernel Drivers for Mali-T880 / T860 GPUs, User Space Drivers for Mali-T76x GPUs
ARM Mali GPU drivers includes both open source kernel drivers, and binary userspace drivers supporting framebuffer and/ior X11 implementation. The former is rarely an issue and is quickly released, but the latter requires porting and testing for a specific hardware platform, as well legal work, which greatly delay the releases. Mali-T880 GPU was announced at the beginning of the month together with ARM Cortex A72, and on February 17, 2015, ARM released an update to their Mali-T600 series, Mali-T700 series & Mali-T860/T880 GPU kernel device drivers with revision r5p1-00rel0 that adds supports to Mali-T860 and Mali-T880 GPU. These open source drivers are available for Android and Linux, and also support early Mali-T700 and T600 GPUs. Separately, the company has also released Mali-T76X GPU drivers for Firefly board powered by Rockchip RK3288 quad core Cortex A17 processor featuring a Mali-T764 GPU. The first release only supports the framebuffer driver, but ARM […]
HPH NT-V6 Firmware V1.4.4 (Rockchip RK3288) Fixes Ethernet Performance, Adds Smartphone App
When I first started to review Rockchip RK3288 based TV boxes I noticed several had critical issues with Ethernet including Nagrace HPH NT-V6 and Kingnovel K-R6. The main cons of the Nagrace media player included: XBMC has too many issues: VC1 not supported, H.265 support only partial, audio/video sync issue, some MPEG-2 and XVID videos are skipping frames, some of the 4K videos I used could play properly, etc… Some MPEG-2 file won’t play smooth in either XBMC or MX Player Potential Ethernet issues, confirmed with my Gigabit switch (D-Link DSG-1005A) and 10/100Mbps D-Link router (configured as a switch). Since then SPMC and Kodi must have improved video playback issues, but as late as last month I still got feedback from one person (Mr. B.) complaining about Ethernet on HPH NT-V6, but he finally got an email with a new firmware that is said to fix the Ethernet issues and […]
Power Consumption of Amlogic S812 and Rockchip RK3288 TV Boxes
The recent post comparing the power consumption of ODROID-C1 vs Raspberry Pi boards, as made me want to give another try at power consumption measurements. Regular reader already know I made a power measurement board and cables capable of hading different connectors (micro USB, mini USB, power barrels, etc..), but eventually it failed to deliver enough current to the boards for any meaning testing. But since I now have a better power supply, and multi-meter, it was worth another try, especially since I could draw some pretty charts. I decided to test the three most popular Chinese SoCs for mini PCs namely Amlogic S812 (4x Cortex A9), Rockchip RK3288 (4x Cortex A17), and Allwinner A80 (4x Cortex A15 + 4x Cortex A7) using respectively Eny M8S, Open Hour Chameleon, and A80 OptimusBoard. If you are paying attention, you must have noticed Allwinner A80 is not part of the title, that […]
Linux 3.19 Release – Main Changes, ARM and MIPS Architectures
Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 3.19 yesterday: So nothing all that exciting happened, and while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn’t any reason for it. Just as an example, Sasha Levin used KASan and found an interesting bug in paravirtualized spinlocks, but realistically it’s been around forever, and it’s not even clear that it can really ever trigger in practice. We’ll get it fixed, and mark it for stable, and tempting as it was, it wasn’t really a reason to delay 3.19. And the actual fixes that went in (see appended shortlog) were all fairly small, with the exception of some medium-sized infiniband changes that were all reverting code that just wasn’t ready. So it’s out there – go and get it. And as a result, the merge window for 3.20 is obviously also now open. Linus Linux 3.18 improved performance of […]
OneBoard PRO+ is an Android Mechanical Keyboard Powered by Rockchip RK3288 SoC
When Coolship keyboard computer was announced in 2013, it caught the attention of some people, but unfortunately the crowdfunding campaign was a disaster despite reaching their funding target, and few people, if any, ever received the device. But if you are a nostalgic and still would like a Commodore C64-like computer in a keyboard, a company call Acooo has designed OneBoard PRO+ based on Rockchip RK3288 processor and with a backlit mechanical keyboard housed in an aluminum case. OneBoard PRO+ specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3288 Quad Core Cortex A17 up to 1.8GHz with ARM Mali-T764 GPU supporting OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0, Open VG1.1, OpenCL, DirectX11 System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash + SD card slot up to 32GB Keyboard – 83-keys QWERTY keyboard with backlit keys made of ABS plastic Video Output / Input – HDMI output, DVI input Audio Output / Input – HDMI, 3.5 mm […]
Kodi DVB and PVR Support on Android (Rockchip RK3288)
XBMC/Kodi for Android has come a long way, but it’s still missing some features of Kodi Linux, such as Live TV (DVB) and video recording (PVR) function that so far could only be supported in Linux port of Kodi such as OpenELEC linux distributions, simply because PVR backends such as TVHeadend were not available for Android. So what’s TVheadend is exactly and what features does it bring? It’s an open source TV streaming PVR backend software application for Linux supporting DVB-S/S2, DVB-C, DVB-T/T2, ATSC, IPTV (UDP/HTTP), and Analog video (V4L) as input sources. Version 3.4 also adds support for time-shifting. Now the good news is that Freaktab user’s Taki has posted instructions to install TVHeadend server for RK3288. So if you have a compatible USB Tuner, you should be able to watch live TV on your Rockchip RK3288 based TV box. After the server is installed, you’d also need to […]
4K Output and Video Playback Capability Tested on 6 ARM based mini PCs and Boards
Since I’ve now got a 4K TV, I’ve decided to test 4K support for six different platforms based on Rockchip, Allwinner, Amlogic, Realtek, HiSilicon, and Mstar processors. For all these platforms I’ll report HDMI 4K output options, user interface resolution, and take close up pictures of the screen while displaying a 4K 1×1 grid picture and video with the image players, and video players such as MX Player or XBMC depending which are available in the firmware. Test Setup and Procedure I’m using LG 42UB820T 42″ UltraHD television with an HDMI cable connected to HDMI 1 port of the TV. Please note that my TV only support 8-bit color depth / YCbCr 4:2:0 which may cause compatibility issues with some boxes, at least the ones based on RK3288 processor, for 2160p 50Hz or 60Hz mode. I’ll take close-up pictures of the screen with a Canon PowerShot A2300HD camera by holding […]