TV box News - Page 13 of 108 - CNX Software

September 16, 2019September 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

MINIX Unveils NEO T5 & NEO U22-XJ Amlogic S905X2 / S922XJ Android TV Media Hubs

We’ve already seen MINIX showcased a fanless Gemini Lake mini PC at IFA 2019, but the company also had two upcoming Amlogic TV boxes on display at the event. MINIX NEO T5 features Amlogic S905X2 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, while MINIX NEO U22-XJ TV box is powered by an Amlogic S922XJ hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor. The former runs Android TV 9.0 with Google certification, while the latter comes pre-loaded with Android 9.0 OS. I had never heard about S922XJ, and apparently, Amlogic has yet to formally announce it, so I wonder whether it could be Amlogic S922X-B tipped by Khadas a while ago with higher CPU & GPU clock speeds. The processor will also come with Dolby Vision and Dolby Audio licenses, and Amlogic has a history of giving different processor names depending on the audio licenses. MINIX NEO T5 Specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X2 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with Arm Mali-G31 […]

September 16, 2019November 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Linux 5.3 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.3: So we’ve had a fairly quiet last week, but I think it was good that we ended up having that extra week and the final rc8. Even if the reason for that extra week was my travel schedule rather than any pending issues, we ended up having a few good fixes come in, including some for some bad btrfs behavior. Yeah, there’s some unnecessary noise in there too (like the speling fixes), but we also had several last-minute reverts for things that caused issues. One _particularly_ last-minute revert is the top-most commit (ignoring the version change itself) done just before the release, and while it’s very annoying, it’s perhaps also instructive. What’s instructive about it is that I reverted a commit that wasn’t actually buggy. In fact, it was doing exactly what it set out to do, and did it […]

August 26, 2019 by Karl Johnson - 10 Comments

Beelink GT-King (Amlogic S922X) TV Box Review

Rant Karl here. I have been playing around with Android boxes for several years. Unfortunately, some fundamental issues from when I first started playing around with these boxes are still there. They have come a long way since the MK808 with Rockchip RK3066 processor. The MK808 was my first endeavor into Android on the TV in 2013. I can’t believe it’s been nearly 6 years. In 2014 Google introduced Android TV and the Nexus Player. It was designed for a TV and controller. The first boxes/sticks adapted the stock Android experience to run on a TV, but without a touch interface the experience was/is not optimal. Sure you get thousands and thousands of apps but a lot of them don’t work. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed much. If these boxes came with Linux and Android I don’t think I would complain as much. I would consider it a tinkering box. But […]

August 19, 2019August 19, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Onenuts Nut 9 TV Box Runs Android TV, Doubles as a Smart Speaker

We’ve previously covered HF10 2-in-1 Android speaker and TV box that looks more like a speaker than a TV box, and since we’ve posted about it several years got improved to work as a smart speaker supporting Amazon Alexa. If you’re a distributor looking for something with the same functionalities, but in a more compact TV box form factor, Shenzhen Tomato got you covered with their Onenuts Nut 9 TV box that works as a traditional TV box running Android TV 7.1, as well as a smart speaker with support Google Assistant even when the TV is off thanks to a built-in microphone and a speaker placed on the bottom of the enclosure. Onenuts Nut 9 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X Arm Cortex-A53 processor up to 1.5GHz with penta-core Mali-450MP GPU up to 750Mhz+ System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash, micro SD card slot Video Output – […]

July 30, 2019July 30, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

“New” Allwinner H603 Processor Shows Up in X96H Low-cost TV Box

A little while ago, we started to see Rockchip RK3318 TV boxes that appeared to have the same specifications as Rockchip RK3328 based devices. We later learned RK3318 was a cost-down version of RK3328 but failed to get any details about the lower-cost as we were informed Rockchip did not really want to advertise the cheaper model. It appears Allwinner may have done something similar with Allwinner H6 processor, as we’ve started to see an Allwinner H603 processor shows up in X96H TV box on Aliexpress and GearBest with price starting at around $26.99 shipped in 2GB RAM + 16GB storage configuration, and going up to $40.99 with 4GB RAM, 64GB flash, and dual-band WiFi & Bluetooth connectivity. X96H TV box specifications: SoC – Allwinner H603 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.5 GHz with Arm Mali-T720 GPU System Memory / Storage Configurations 2GB DDR3 + 16GB eMMC flash + microSD slot […]

July 23, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

AFRd Auto Frame Rate Daemon Works with 64-bit Amlogic Processors

Automatic frame rate switching in TV box ensures video output matches the video frame rate in order to avoid skipped frames (judder) from time to time, and makes the videos much smoother to watch, especially to trained eyes. The problem is that the feature is not always implemented, and/or does not work for all apps. AFRd auto frame rate daemon aims to solve this issue by automatically switching video output to match the video framerate – e.g. 23.976 fps or 59.94 fps – on Android TV boxes powered by one of Amlogic 64-bit processors, be it S905, S905X, S905X2, S912, S905W and other more recent Armv8 processors from the company. Developed by Andrey Zabolotny (anpaza), AFRd is Linux daemon can be linked to either bionic for Android, or glibc for Linux operating systems, and the source code can be found on Github. It relies on two techniques to detect the […]

July 23, 2019October 1, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Beelink GT1 Mini 2 Amlogic S905X3 TV Box is Now Sold for $70

Around two weeks ago, we covered Beelink GT1 Mini 2 that was one of the first TV boxes to get an Arm Cortex-A55 processor, namely the latest Amlogic S905X3 quad-core processor, and the company also shared benchmarks showing Amlogic S905X3 was only marginally faster than Amlogic S905X2 quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC. As shown in our S905X3 vs S905X2 comparison, the main improvements for the former are the presence of an NPU for AI acceleration, and support for faster DDR4 memory up to 3,200 MHz. Upon the announcement, one person noticed the TV box was sold for $80 on GearBest with the default configuration of 4GB RAM and 64GB storage, and while the price has now dropped to $73.99 on GB, Beelink GT1 Mini 2 can now be purchased found for just $69.99 on Aliexpress including worldwide shipping. Beelink GT1 Mini 2 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor @ […]

July 19, 2019July 19, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Amlogic S905X2 vs S905X3 – Features Comparison

Despite Arm claiming Cortex-A55 core would bring some performance improvements, we’ve recently seen actual Amlogic S905X3 benchmarks show the performance compared to Amlogic S905X2 Arm Cortex-A53 is almost identical (3% improvement for S905X3 CPU, 9% for the GPU). So Amlogic S905X3 TV box processor must differentiate itself from its predecessor by its additional features, and while we published the detailed specifications of Amlogic S905X3 processor a few months ago, we did not provide a side-by-side comparison table just yet. So here’s one courtesy of SDMC (with some corrections). SoC Amlogic S905X2 Amlogic S905X3 CPU 4x Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.80 GHz 4x Arm Cortex-A55 @ 1.91 GHz Neural Network Accelerator N/A Optional 1.2 TOPS NNA GPU Mali-G31 MP2 with OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0, and OpenCL 2.0 Always-on MCU Cortex-M3 & Cortex-M4 (Optional ) Cortex-M3 & Cortex-M4 DDR DDR3-2133 /DDR3L-2133 / DDR4-2666 /LPDDR3-2133 /LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM up to 4G DDR3-2133 /DDR3L-2133 / […]