Rockchip showcased an ultra low cost Linux-based Miracast adapter at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair in April, and we learned the device was powered by Rockchip RK2928 with just 16 MB RAM, a small NOR flash, and would just cost around $10. Rockchip demonstrated the device to Charbax at Computex 2013 in early June, and he uploaded the video yesterday. The demo includes showing off Miracast and DLNA support, with the device connected to an HDTV @ 720p. The adapter as a latency as low as 80ms. Rockchip representative explains that as long as it’s below 100ms it’s not noticeable for typical use (but it might be different for games). They used AMOI N828 smartphone for the demo, but Miracast is supposed to work with any Android 4.2 devices supporting Wi-Fi direct, although I’ve read several users’ reports indicating that may not be the case in practice. The price is […]
Freescale SABRE Lite i.MX6 Development Board Unboxing, Wandboard Quad Comparison, and Quick Start Guide
Freescale SABRE Lite is a development board powered by i.MX6 Quad processor with 1GB RAM, SATA, GbE Ethernet, and more. You can get SABRE Lite specifications in my first post about the board. I recently participated in Element14’s “brainteaser” competition for the 4th birthday of their community, where the company offered 9 SABRE Lite development kit to randomly selected participants, and I got lucky. The board can be purchased for $179 from Element14 (MCIMX6Q-SL). I’ll start by showing what in the package, followed by a side-by-side comparison with Wandboard Quad, and show how to getting started by following the Quick Start Guide provided with the board. SABRE Lite i.MX6 Development Kit Unboxing I received the board about 5 days after I provided my address in a large staple carton box with a few goodies. Beside SABRE Lite devkit, the package comes with Element14’s T-Shirt (not my size), double walled tumbler, […]
Juice Extreme 2 Android TV Home Gateway Features 4 DVB Tuners for Multiscreen Support
Antik Technology, a Slovakia based company, has developed a Android set-top-box powered by STMicro StiH416 SoC. I wrote about the StiH416 development platform previously, and although it’s just a dual core Cortex A9 SoC, its video capabilities are impressive as it supports multiple simultaneous video decoding streams. The set-top box called Juice Extreme 2 leverages those capabilities with 4 DVB tuners (DVB-T or DVB-S2) that provide four different streams, and transcode them, to all video playback devices around your home such as TV, PC, tablet and smartphones, or record them to an internal SATA drive. JUICE EXTREME 2 key features: SoC – STMicro STiH416 (Orly) dual core Cortex A9 @ 1.2 GHz + ARM Mali 400MP4 GPU System Memory – 2 GB DDR3 Storage – 1 GB Flash + internal SATA connector + SD card slot Video: Quadruple DVB Tunner CVBS/Y Pb Pr (3.5mm jack) Tuner board connector RF IN/OUT […]
$79 Plug Makes Creating Your Own Cloud Easy
The “Plug” is a device with an Ethernet connection, and a USB port that allows you to connect up to 8 USB drives, and access those in a unified fashion from all your devices. It’s a bit like dropbox, except you are in charge, and the price per GB is much cheaper than cloud services. The Cloud Guys have launched a kickstarter campaign that has already received over $220,000 in pledges after just over two days. The Plug technical specifications are as follows: OpenWRT based Embedded Linux x86 compatible processor Port for your hard drive – USB 2.0 Port for Internet – Ethernet port 10/100 Mbps Average transfer speed: 30 Mbps Supported file systems: NTFS, HFS+, Ext3/Ext4, FAT32 Number of drives supported (using an external USB hub): 8 LED Display: Power/ Action Dimensions – 270mm (W) x 110mm (D) x 20mm (H) (This must be wrong as it seems way […]
Systena Tizen Tablet Hands-on Video
Systena, a Japanese company, is currently developing a Tizen tablet with a quad core Cortex A9 processor at 1.4Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. The tablet features a 10.1″display (1920×1080), supports 802.11b/g/n WiFi, and comes with a microSD card slot, as well as a 2MP rear camera and 0.3Mp front camera. Tizen Indonesia got a prototype of the tablet, and give it a try in the video below (no audio). We can see the boot, lock screen and gallery application. The system does not seem very fluid at this stage of development, but hopefully Tizen will be optimized for better performance before the final release. The system currently runs Tizen 2.0, but the company plans to upgrade to Tizen 2.1 for the developer version of the device, before selling the device to the general public. Via Liliputing and Tizen Experts Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 […]
Control your DSLR Camera via Wi-Fi using an Android mini PC and a Tablet
DSLR Controller is a paid Android app (beta) that uses your Canon EOS DSLR camera USB port in order to control it and access the camera live view with a tablet or smartphone. That may be useful, but it’s much better if you can roam a bit, and are not limited by the USB cable length. That’s why the application has been improved some time ago in order to use 2 Android devices, usually smartphones or tablets. One device is connected via USB to the DSLR camera, and act as a Wi-Fi access point, and the other device connects via Wi-Fi to allow full control of the camera. However, you don’t really need a screen on a Wi-Fi access point, so instead of using mobile devices, the developers decided to use an Android mini PC, specifically CX-919, which is just one of the many RK3188 mini PC available today, coupled […]
Play HEVC/H.265 Videos and Embed HEVC Streams into MP4 and TS Files with openHEVC and GPAC
I wrote an introduction to H.265 (aka HEVC) at the end of last year, including instructions showing how to encode videos to HEVC using the reference implementation. It worked but since it was not optimized for speed, it was extremely slow. Today I’ve stumbled across openHEVC, a open source compliant HEVC video decoder written in C, created as a fork of Libav. This is supposed to work pretty well as the implementation was used at Roland Garros Tennis tournament to playback an 720p50 HEVC stream transmitted over DVB-T2, IPTV, and MPEG DASH. Today I’ll mainly tried out the instructions provided on openHEVC github repo including: Build the source and playing a raw HEVC stream with hevc utility Build GPAC (open source multimedia framework), to get MP4Box, mp42ts, and MP4Client utilities. Import a raw HEVC stream into MP4 and TS containers, and play it back with GPAC tools. I’ve performed the […]
Cloud Media FreeOTT Player Review
Syabas was a company designing set-top boxes such as Popcorn Hour Media Tank that were relatively popular before the Android media player invasion. The company is now called Cloud Media, and they offer a tiny media player called FreeOTT that connects to their Apps Market and bring online video, Internet radio, social media and other streaming media to your television. The device is free (as in free beer), as it’s not actually available for sale to the general public, and the only ways to get it is to have your ISP or telecom provider set it to you, or win one from the regular giveaways organized by the company. I won one via a giveaway announced on their Facebook page, and I had just to pay $5 (via Paypal) for shipping. The company does not provide detailed specifications for their device but we do know it’s a Linux based media […]