Have Android TV box. What to do next?

[bgowland]

I'm still feeling like a newbie here trying to read about all the new stuff going on.

The box I got is a generic (no name) box off Amazon - nice remote and mini keyboard, Android v12. Am I right in thinking I just need to side load UIDroid and it'll connect to my npvr server?

Cheers,
Brian

[mvallevand]

Yes. Note that generic boxes and TVs with built in Android use many chipsets and some are better than others. I generally recommend Amlogic but there are many flavours (more then Intel for PC)

Martin

[bgowland]

Yes.  Note that generic boxes and TVs with built in Android use many chipsets and some are better than others.  I generally recommend Amlogic but there are many flavours (more then Intel for PC)

Martin

Thanks. I haven't looked closely at yet, I'll try a bit later. I was going to order a TiVo stream as well but when I went back to look the seller had sold out.

Cheers,
Brian

[bgowland]

As with any generic boxes regardless of purpose the Amazon listing was a bit sparse for technical details. I scrolled through all the pretty pictures in the listing and eventually found one that shows it's an Amlogic S905W2.

Cheers,
Brian

[mvallevand]

I do have an S8905W in one of boxes The good news is that it should support CoreElec so you have potentially a good Kodi client if it is too weak for Android. The important question for Android is does it have Widewine L1 otherwise no DRM playback.

Martin.

[bgowland]

I can't find mention of Widevine so I don't know. I'm not sure what DRM playback I'd need.

[mvallevand]

Not for uidroid, but some users might want OTT media from services like BBC iPlayer, and ITVX. There are also the commercial services like Netflix.

Martin

[bgowland]

My interest in the box and uidroid is really just to emulate what we had with the PCH and your custom firmware for npvr (the good ol' days ).

Our TV has iPlayer, itvx, Amazon Prime and Netflix apps built-in so that's not an issue. In saying that I just installed the iPlayer app on the android tv box from Play Store and it works fine. It also came with Netflix built-in though I don't have an account at the moment but I'm guessing it means the box has relevant DRM capabilities.

I'll connected the box up to the tv in the living room later and let my wife loose with it - she remembers npvr and the pch and the ui so I'll find out what she thinks.  

Cheers,
Brian

[mvallevand]

Indeed I like the PCH. The GUI API was more efficient than the UI client API but much harder for sub to maintain so he removed it. Fortunately networks and these boxes are faster, back then there was barely enough horsepower for me to add HE-AAC remuxing to mvpmcx2

Possibly iPlayer doesn't Widevine L1 many of the cheaper boxes have L3.

What SmartTV do you have that doesn't support UI clients?

Martin

[bgowland]

Yes, everything is a lot more powerful. This Android TV box probably has a lot more CPU and GPU power than my old Pentium server I used for gbpvr and npvr. I haven't even connected the box via wired LAN but it's happily streaming the test recordings I've done with npvr over wifi.

The TV is a Toshiba - it claims it's a smart TV but I can only install apps from Toshiba's own site. In saying that I didn't do much to find out if I can hack it as iPlayer, ItvX and Prime are all we've used so far.

Cheers,
Brian