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I have one of these, and there are a couple of notable things I found out while setting it up. * It has CEC support, which is rare among similar devices. (The
by sgentle 13y ago
I have one of these, and there are a couple of notable things I found out while setting it up.
* It has CEC support, which is rare among similar devices. (The only other one I know is RPi. Thanks for nothing Ouya.)
* The extra CPU and RAM is fantastic. The little guy flies along. I was happily compiling things on it at quite reasonable speeds.
* The eMMC option is pretty cool, but be careful because their MicroSD adapter is pretty finicky (it wouldn't work on my Macbook, did work on my Mac Mini running Linux)
* It has a terribly annoying blinking blue light that can't be turned off and is brighter than the sun. I put some tape over it and felt briefly like macgyver.
* Nothing except for XBMC supports hardware video decoding. That means if you want to use VLC or something, too bad (for now anyway).
* Android on it was just about useless, but it's neat to have it as an option.
* There are a bunch of proprietary blobs and versions of things that need to be installed on the device for it to work. In practice, this isn't really a problem because this is all done for you in the stock image.
* XBMC was still pretty laggy on Ubuntu, and couldn't play video without skipping. Apparently it's better on Debian. Nobody seems to understand why this is. Apparently it's blazing fast on Android.
* The devs are insanely active, both in pushing code and on the forums. I say devs, I think it's one guy who never sleeps.
All told, I'm currently not using it for XBMC (holding out for the Ubuntu situation being fixed), but I am running other stuff on it that was taxing the memory and CPU of my Pi, so I'm pretty happy with that. It doesn't have anything like the plug-it-in-now-it-works experience of Raspbmc.
I found myself going down a dark and terrible road of alternate mali drivers, Xorg munging and running es2gears over and over again. If you're considering doing that, don't do it. You will achieve only regret.
- pantalaimon 13y ago> It has a terribly annoying blinking blue light that can't be turned off Did you check /sys/class/leds/ ?
- sgentle 13y agoWhoa, that's great. Thanks! For some reason I could only find forum posts saying it couldn't be turned off, but searching for that specific path says it works: http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=3377 http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=3377
- jayd16 13y ago> Android on it was just about useless, but it's neat to have it as an option. Useless how? Performance was poor, or without a touch screen you weren't able to use it?
- sgentle 13y agoNo, the performance was great. The UI is not unusuable, but pretty frustrating, and as far as I know there's no CEC support in Android (or, at least, their Android build). So as a set top box I don't think it works. Worse still, you can't really run background services without a lot of hassle, so you also throw away a lot of what makes it compelling as a mini-server. So by useless I suppose I mean it doesn't do anything very well.
- beagle3 13y agoDoes anything support video encoding at reasonable speed? I need an h264 "genlock" device that could do reasonable resolutions & frame rates (720p@30fps, 1920p@15fps). It should be stupid simple if devices let you put some code between sensor and the encoder, but basically nothing does. Apparently, you can do it on the rPi, but it doesn't have enough power to decode a stream, "genlock" and encode it in real time. (Though, I'm going to try - maybe it can be done).
- abn 13y agoYes it does and uses standard linux v4l2 interface via the Samsung MFC.
- brechmos 13y agoI have been looking for a single board setup that can run flash in the browser. Have you tried running flash in a browser (e.g., youtube)? Would love to know. It sounds like a great little board.
- abn 13y agoA Bucnh of blobs = 1 Single blob for Mali. The other files are symlinks ok? They put a newer XBMC image lately that fixed all the slow issues.