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 Post subject: Cheap XBMC frontend
PostPosted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 8:48 pm 
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location: Arlington, MA
I just acquired a cheap (<$100) android mini-pc (G-Box Midnight MX2) to use as an XBMC frontend and so far I'm pretty impressed.

We're talking about a palm sized box (5"x5"x2") with a 1.2-1.5 Ghz CPU and barely 1 Gb of RAM, that draws maybe 2 watts, smoothly playing 1080i or 1080p video, when just a few years back we were still telling people that they needed a 3GHz CPU preferably with 1.5-2 Gb of RAM and a video card that provided hardware acceleration to reliably play HD content without glitches.

These little mini-PCs seem very promising and potentially fertile ground for a dedicated MythTV distro. There is even enough sample kernel code available from a couple of the SoC makers to make it possible to for people to produce their own Linux kernels and even mini-distros (e.g. picuntu for the RK3066, an Arch build for the Amlogic M3, or J1nx's work on the Amlogic MX)

http://liliputing.com/2013/05/picuntu-homeio-for-rk3066-tv-sticks-makes-installing-linux-easyish.html
http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5418
http://www.j1nx.nl/amlogic-mx-linux-armhf-3-0-50-kernel-xbmc/
http://openlinux.amlogic.com/


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 Post subject: Re: Cheap XBMC frontend
PostPosted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 9:58 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:14 am
Posts: 1343
Location: Orlando FL
that was the hope of the raspberry pi as well. on dx.com I see little Android computers for cheap all the time.

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 Post subject: Re: Cheap XBMC frontend
PostPosted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 9:32 pm 
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location: Arlington, MA
True enough, but it's kind of underpowered. The fact that XMBC works on it is an amazing feat.

I've been watching the ARM SBC space closely since the Pi was announced waiting for them to get to the point they've reached. Inexpensive dual or quad core SoCs with clocks >1Ghz, 1-2Gb of RAM and OSS drivers available to enable good Linux kernel support.


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 Post subject: Re: Cheap XBMC frontend
PostPosted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 1:46 am 
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Joined: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:14 am
Posts: 1343
Location: Orlando FL
I've been keeping an eye out as well. I also heard that the new Xbox one will be running hypervisor (their emulator) one virtual machine will be running a version of windows 8 for apps the other the Xbox game engine. It seems like a hack to run a linux vm hyper v or even to write an Xbox app for mythtv.

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