Android Boxs

[MattP]

Can somebody explain the concept of these things and which one to buy please..

 

My brother is going on and on about wanting one expecting me to have some knowledge about them but I have no clue.

[stevie_b]

Do you mean these:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/android-tv-boxes-what-are-they-and-what-can-they-do/

 

I've never heard of them TBH. I love this quote near the end of the article:

 

Should You Buy One?

 

Probably not.

[thomo8568]

I've know a few people who have ones like this.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/ulk/itm/272059161661

It basically turns your tv in to a big android tablet. You can download apps like HD cinema, movie box and kodi which allow you to watch films (new and old) and tv series. Think Amazon tv without the subscription.

[Mk4Gaz]

You're better off buying a jailbroken amazon fire stick, with kodi installed.

Look out for one that's running 'the beast' build software, as it's the most complete and well laid out.

[Style]

Scott incoming, pretty sure he's got one of these

[MaveriK]

You're better off buying a jailbroken amazon fire stick, with kodi installed.

Look out for one that's running 'the beast' build software, as it's the most complete and well laid out.

 

Or just buy the stick and do it yourself, its very straight forward.

[Scott]

Scott incoming, pretty sure he's got one of these

 

One? I've got 5

 

One of the best bits of kit available right now for anyone interested in streaming. Have to go against the jailbroken firestick recommendation though, they're good but a decent box is far more powerful and useful (think high end video, 3D video, etc where power & ram is required). I'd definitely have a firestick for a secondary unit, but not for my main source of entertainment.

 

The long and short of it is you can effectively access just about anything you can think of. Old TV shows, Current TV shows, Old movies, Current movies, Live TV (Including Sports & movies, etc).

 

The best part is that if you know your way around the software and some very basic MySQL you can create in-house databases where you can share information to other Kodi devices (I have all mine linked). Basically that means if you watch an episode of a show downstairs, then access the same show upstairs... it knows what episode you are on/watching.

 

You can basically delve in as deep as you like, or keep it as simple as you like. To "try before you buy" download Kodi from the play store on an Android device. Google "Genesis for Kodi", install that following the instructions, Google "SportsDevil" and do the same. From there you can access just about everything you could want (very simply). If you want to dig a little deeper Google Renegades TV.

 

What to look out for is the following:

 

You want at LEAST a quad core processor. They are on the market with Octacore processors so I would suggest paying the tiny bit extra for one of those.

You want to get 2GB of RAM. Most of the boxes have 1GB and while that's enough for most tasks, you really need 2GB for stability and future proofing.

If you can (I've not found one yet) get one with a Gigabit ethernet port, 100/10 is OK but if you want to stream something really big it might struggle.

Try to get one with Dual channel Wireless (Only applies if you have a multi-channel router, 5GHz rocks though).

 

My current setup is as follows:

 

Computer/Server/Media-Server with 5TB of my favourite shows, movies, etc all categorised for myself, my Wife and my Kids.

Wired Droidbox downstairs (Multiple Profiles to track individual users stuff, I have my stuff...the Wife has hers etc)

Wired Droidbox in Bedroom (Multiple Profiles to track individual users stuff, I have my stuff...the Wife has hers etc)

Wireless Droidbox in Kids room (Setup to only access kids stuff)

Galaxy Tablet with mutli-profiles

Kids Galaxy Tablet with access to kids stuff

My Phone Setup with my stuff (Online & offline profiles)

 

Everything interconnects and, when online in the house, uses the database in the main server.

 

Keep in mind, I've been messing with "Kodi" since the XBox original XBMC days so I've learned a few tricks over the years. It really is user friendly though, I even made mutliple code changes to the core of the system just for fun

[Scott]

This is a poorly setup system with a whole load of dross on there that you don't want (It's running very sluggish). However, it does give an idea of the sort of things you can access/do.

 

[video=youtube;ioQgYU7-Flg]

[Style]

I've just had a letter through the door from Virgin to say they're increasing their prices and if I want to, I can cancel my contract for free.

 

May take them up on the offer in favour of one of these! Looks like you can get nigh on everything.

 

This look decent Scott?

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DroidBOX-Q8-S-Android-4-4-2-4K-UHD-TV-Box-Movies-TV-Loaded-Kodi-15-2-SKYPE-/191117460926?hash=item2c7f7d05be

[Mk4Gaz]

Scott, what Internet connection/speed do you have?

I was thinking of going the firestick route, as a few friends have got them (jailbroken) and they work great. I might look into the android box option, and weigh it up.

 

I'm currently with sky fibre, and my connection is really poor. I used to get circa 15-20 mb, but lately it hovers around a measly 6! Do you think that'll stream ok?

 

To be honest, I just want to ditch sky TV. I pay best part of £100 per month, for the privilege, but it's all repeats, and definitely not value for money. My cost includes my fibre broadband, but I'd be happy to switch providers if they can guarantee a better speed!

[Scott]

Scott, what Internet connection/speed do you have?

I was thinking of going the firestick route, as a few friends have got them (jailbroken) and they work great. I might look into the android box option, and weigh it up.

 

I'm currently with sky fibre, and my connection is really poor. I used to get circa 15-20 mb, but lately it hovers around a measly 6! Do you think that'll stream ok?

 

To be honest, I just want to ditch sky TV. I pay best part of £100 per month, for the privilege, but it's all repeats, and definitely not value for money. My cost includes my fibre broadband, but I'd be happy to switch providers if they can guarantee a better speed!

 

I'm with Virgin Media and I see 106mb/s on their 100mb line. With Virgin the speed is pretty much a given due to the cable system that's in place. The only time I've had it drop lower is when there is a fault with the system (not often but it does happen during upgrades etc). Over the next couple of months we're getting a free increase to 150mb/s. The top spec at the moment is 150mb but it's increasing to 200mb at the same time. One of the provisions when I move house is that we're in a cable area, if we aren't the house will need to seriously impress lol.

 

The Firesticks work well but they just aren't on par with the boxes tech/power wise. You're restricted to wireless for a start which, for me at least, can be a bit of a bottleneck. If you decide to use your microwave you'll probably notice a signal drop

 

6mb/s should be fine for these boxes, I can't see any issue with that. Netflix will happily stream reasonable HD at that rate. The great thing is that if your setup is on a go slow one night you can drop the quality of the stream to suit (1080p, HD, HQ, MQ and LQ are the options for the most part). There are frustrating aspects to these boxes (dropped connections, no links working, etc) and there's a steep learning curve but once you get started you find your feet quite quickly.

 

We currently pay £30 per month. We did the advance line rental which saved us £70 or something ITR. Instead of £200 for the year we paid something like £130 advance so we don't pay line rental. The rest is broadband & Tivo. We're on the bottom HD package which is basically just freeview, but we pay £5 a month for Tivo (Amazing bit of kit, record 3 things and watch a 4th, recorded, lol). Coming from Sky it takes a bit of getting used to but once you do, it's brilliant. I find the Sky interface tired now, it needs a proper revamp. All things considered we effectively pay £41 per month

[Scott]

Just did a quick test. This was over wireless too.....

 

 

One issue is the stock router, I hate it. I went for a major upgrade (Asus RT-N66U) which makes a good difference for me. The stock router takes a bit of setting up to get the most out of it, the stock settings are garbage.

 

I've just had a letter through the door from Virgin to say they're increasing their prices and if I want to, I can cancel my contract for free.

 

May take them up on the offer in favour of one of these! Looks like you can get nigh on everything.

 

This look decent Scott?

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DroidBOX-Q8-S-Android-4-4-2-4K-UHD-TV-Box-Movies-TV-Loaded-Kodi-15-2-SKYPE-/191117460926?hash=item2c7f7d05be

 

Just looking now bud, I think there's a better option (I was looking the other day).

[Scott]

I've just had a letter through the door from Virgin to say they're increasing their prices and if I want to, I can cancel my contract for free.

 

May take them up on the offer in favour of one of these! Looks like you can get nigh on everything.

 

This look decent Scott?

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DroidBOX-Q8-S-Android-4-4-2-4K-UHD-TV-Box-Movies-TV-Loaded-Kodi-15-2-SKYPE-/191117460926?hash=item2c7f7d05be

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Octa-Core-KODI-TV-Box-Android-5-1-Lollipop-Smart-Player-FULLY-LOADED-4K-5GHz-UK-/400758047911?hash=item5d4f0a84a7:g:OQYAAOSwiwVWSgYL

 

That was the one there that I spotted. Ticked every box for me, the only thing I wasn't sure was if it had a Gigabyte network port. I doubt it will, but I doubt I would max out a 5ghz connection with anything I have/need.

 

That's the extreme end of the spectrum though, you can get cheap boxes for £30 that'll do the job if you wanted to save a bit of dosh. I personally have an expensive one downstairs and cheap ones upstairs, the simple criteria for me was 2GB of RAM for those. Downstairs is the power house

[imi]

The long and short of it is you can effectively access just about anything you can think of. Old TV shows, Current TV shows, Old movies, Current movies, Live TV (Including Sports & movies, etc).

 

LIVE TV, interesting? who provides that and is there an extra subs for it?

 

As for the rest - I am assuming they are all streams from the cloud (various unknown sources) - do you know if Virgin is clamping down on such streams due to copyright, etc?

[Scott]

LIVE TV, interesting? who provides that and is there an extra subs for it?

 

As for the rest - I am assuming they are all streams from the cloud (various unknown sources) - do you know if Virgin is clamping down on such streams due to copyright, etc?

 

All free, no subscription... no sign in.... nothing.

 

I don't think ISPs can do anything really, there will be various proxies and systems in play making a trace/block pretty much impossible.

 

I don't know if they are seen as a threat at this moment in time. There is no substitute for having a premium cable subscription. Let's be honest here, this is streaming for free...... it's by no means perfect and the quality is OK. The odd channel/thing is HD and unbelievable quality but it's few and far between.

 

Interestingly the movies & TV shows ARE HD, it's just the live TV that's a bit more troublesome. Once you get the hang of where to go for what it's pretty much second nature.

[Scott]

Do you mean these:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/android-tv-boxes-what-are-they-and-what-can-they-do/

 

I've never heard of them TBH. I love this quote near the end of the article:

 

The person who wrote that/investigated the boxes clearly has no idea what they were capable of. My guess is they are an apple fan and only compared what the apple could do, rather than what the android could do outwith the "norm".

 

The points regarding the hardware are genuine though. You would need a top end phone/tablet to beat them nowadays though and the game has really moved on since 2013.

[Littler]

I am an apple fan however in the last 12 months I have an android phone and the MXQ android tv box (will alway have my macs though). There is so much you can have set up, having read this thread I am no where near the level of Scott but for TV and film streaming it's great. Due to my TV having dlna access for the NAS I have it booting straight into Kodi and is ready to go.

 

Scott - any further tips/tricks you want to share

[Scott]

I am an apple fan however in the last 12 months I have an android phone and the MXQ android tv box (will alway have my macs though). There is so much you can have set up, having read this thread I am no where near the level of Scott but for TV and film streaming it's great. Due to my TV having dlna access for the NAS I have it booting straight into Kodi and is ready to go.

 

Scott - any further tips/tricks you want to share

 

I've only really taken any time to investigate what I want to do but here are a few things that I have done:

 

Fixed Parental Controls (the author may have caught up but doubtful as he wasn't too happy about a guy who just found out what Python was fixing his code for him )

Created Multiple Profiles with individual Database access (4 profiles, Daddy, Mummy, Mummy & Daddy, Kids). This means that each profile has it's own online MySQL Database rather than a shared one. Works with video & audio so all of my media is shared and database registered.

Created "Online" shared information such as favourites, thumbnails, etc. The thumbnails especially use a large resource when your media collection is as big as mine. Rather than clog up each individual box and slow it down (these things love to be streamlined), I have shared what I can on my media server. Effectively meaning I use 1/5th of the space and that space is on my Media PC rather than each individual box.

Added certain TV shows from Genesis to my library...... only shared across all devices. This was a tricky one to figure out but once I did it was a doddle. This is a HUGE feature for me. Instead of going into Genesis and searching for a particular TV show every time there is a new episode..... I've added the TV show to my library, when Genesis updates any new episodes are shown in "TV Shows" and the full season of the show is on there. Thanks to having individual profiles we all have our own shows in TV shows. This is the reason for having a shared "Mummy & Daddy" one, as we enjoy some shows together

 

If you didn't know, you can add essentially ANYTHING to your favourites. It doesn't need to be a particular file, link, or anything.... it can be basically anything you can bring a menu up on. One of my favourites is to refresh the Genesis TV shows so that I get the latest stuff showing

 

I've had a go at setting up Renegades TV but I need to seriously streamline it. The guide is very comprehensive but the selection of video addons used is ridiculous. I genuinely have 6 addons (with the exception of my laptop where I trial run all the stuff) on my boxes, I don't feel the need for anything else. SportsDevil, Genesis, Mikey's Karaoke, Navi-X (used sparingly), p2p-streams (used sparingly) and youtube (required for Mikey's).

 

I'll do a demo vid of my setup if I get a chance

[Scott]

[Littler]

Thanks for doing that Scott, you do realise I'm going to have to look at a few things that you've done and I may well be pinging over some questions!!

[Scott]

Shouldn't be a problem mate. The legwork has been done. Just about every one of my mods is a couple of lines of code, it's a doddle. Figuring out the couple of lines of code was the hard part

[imi]

Thanks Scott - very informative - bookmarked for later.

[Shane]

I use a Minix android box loaded with Kodi at my house in Romania for watching UK TV, now bear in mind I work in the satellite coms industry and have access to pretty much as much gear as I want, this is still my preferred route. At present I don't even have an wired internet connection there, I rely on a 3g mobile wifi apator, well its a 4g one but in my town there I see only 3g at present and its still brilliant. There are Vulkano and Sling apps for Android too so have various streams running in head ends here for work that I can also log onto. Brilliant bits of kit.

 

There's another good variation on this called red 360 http://www.red360.tv/ these are great too and based on android nicely pre-configured, but cost more. However the quality of live feeds is great on these and for work we use these quite a bit to source various Arabic channels I need to stream for our in house cable systems where we cant have 2 & 3 metre dishes.for Nilesat reception.

 

Great cost effective solution for an alternative source of entertainment, although there are limitations in terms of resilience and quality of live feeds.

[jim]

I ditched my £100+ a month sky subscription and have my PC connected to my big TV, and my broadband is connected to it by cable rather than wireless. I use kodi on it sometimes for films but mainly for the football, 9 times out of 10 the streams are as good as watching it on sky, the obvious added bonus with it is that I can get all the matches, not just the ones that sky (or bt sport) decide to show.

[JasonR24]

Yea definitely looking at something like this, I absolutely hate sky, total con artists