I was figuring out what to do with my 5 disk CD changer and cassette deck recently. Liked the idea a of thumb drive holding 200 or more CD’s…
And I wound up using an old Android cell phone in airplane mode - works like an Android tablet.
Anyway I was poking around with things and saw something about Android TV! I asked at a local store and they said they did not have any. I looked on the internet and only found a couple of Sony’s for $600 plus…
And then I found it! A “MINIX NEO U1” media hub!
This apparently runs Android and connects to all things TV. I found a highly technical review of this gizmo here…
And reading that, I learned the box apparently comes with an OPEN SOURCE media player called “Kodi” (https://kodi.tv)
Being as I am totally fed up with anything Microsoft, I REALLY like the words “OPEN SOURCE”!
Anyway I ordered one along with the “Air mouse” remote and “QWERTY keyboard” on the back.
Because Android and Kodi are open source, I imagine this sort of thing will become the best and will be the wave of the future?
Is this “MINIX” company privately owned? Or publicly traded on a stock exchange? They seem to be located in Hong Kong? Nothing about investor relations on their web site???
Anyway whoever designed this seems to be a bunch of very smart folks!
The Amazon FireTV and FireTV Stick are both Android devices (for all practical purposes). You can easily sideload* Kodi and have all the Amazon Video, Amazon Prime Video, etc. There are apps for a bunch of stuff including Netflix and Hulu.
The FireTV is comparable to your device, depending on options. The Stick is not as powerful but it runs Kodi plenty well enough. I have both. I stream via Kodi almost all the time.
They customer service from Amazon is, of course, quite good.
Amazon sells an amazing number of these so the customer base is large and therefore there are a lot of apps and other goodies for them.
Roku devices have an OS based on Linux. Almost all other cheap streaming devices are Android based, as far as I know. Apple TVs use their own OSes descended from MacOS, and hence are also Unix-ish.
You can build your own streaming device from a Raspberry Pi whose main OS is Linux based. I use OpenELEC for it which boots directly into a Kodi fork. But a FireTV Stick will be just as good, cheaper, can run more streaming services and much easier to set up.
(The less said about TiVo the better. After all, this is about the future.)
*There’s an Kodi fork called MrMC available put it’s pay. Amazon banned Kodi from its app store since it’s easy to install plugins that allow watching things for free that you shouldn’t be getting for free. So you download the Kodi app and and install it yourself. Lots of guides for that.
I just did a search for “Android TV” on Amazon and got dozens of hits. The Minix Neo U1 is one of them, but there seem to be many similar products from various little companies - AKASO, NinkBox, Leelbox, NEXBOX, TICTID, Henscoqi, Pigflytech, etc. I bet most of these companies are in Shenzhen (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
You don’t need to run Android to run Kodi. For the past year I’ve been running an Kodi box on a Raspberry Pi 2 board. It runs Raspbian Linux in the background and because it is open source, it is very customizable. Total out of pocket for me to set this up was about $80 ($35 for the raspberry pi 2, another $30 for the add-on that lets me use my IR remote with the Pi, and $5.00 for the enclosure and $5.00 for power supply).
I mentioned this is my first post. And I noted that for all practical purposes an Amazon FireTV Stick will be cheaper and better for streaming. And it is a lot easier for newbies to set up and manage.
One thing that concerns me about the product in the OP. The name MINIX is old and somewhat venerated in computing. The MINIX operating system was a breakthrough in OSes and inspired a lot of other work, notably Linux.
But this MINIX (note they even kept the all caps) is completely unrelated and HK based.
I am very wary of companies that do this sort of name appropriation.
Well I will let you know how I like this MINIX NEO U1… That is IF I can ever get one!
Many sellers seem to be out of stock and I ordered one from someone who appeared to have one on stock (a week ago), but they have yet to ship it! (Maybe they were back ordered too?)
In the mean time I have figured out I can search for a live TV program or Youtube video in Microsoft Edge [Windows 10], start watching it, then click on the three dots in the upper right ( . . . ), then select “Cast media to Device”. And if I have my Samsung TV on, it will appear as a device I can connect to. Then I get sky news or Youtube on my TV!
Note I purchased a separate USB WiFi dongle which plugs into the USB of my Samsung TV, then connected to my local WiFi network in the TV menu.
P.S. You need to turn on the Windows DLNA Media Server. Instructions here…
This is FANTASTIC! I basically have an Android cell phone/Tablet on my TV now. I connected a USB keyboard and it works. Also a wireless PC mouse. That works too!
Can watch anything you can watch on your cell phone.
Anyway I like this so much, I ordered a second NEO U1 for my other TV.