Would the Rock64 make a good SageTV client?

[wayner]

The Rock64 is supposed to cost $25 and run Android 7.1. It is similar to, but in some ways better than, a Raspberry Pi. It has wired internet and USB ports so it should be able to support other IR devices.

https://www.pine64.org/?product=rock...board-computer

ROCK64 is a credit card size 4K60P HDR10 Media Board Computer powered by Rockchip RK3328 Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor and support up to 4GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 memory. It provides eMMC module socket, MicroSD Card slot, Pi-2 Bus, Pi-P5+ Bus, USB 3.0 and many others peripheral devices interface for makers to integrate with sensors and devices. Various Operating System (OS) are made available by open source community such Android 7.1, Debian, Yocto and many more to come.

[texneus]

I don't see any mention of hardware decode acceleration, either MPG2 or 4, in any of the documentation. Based on that I would have to say it's a non-starter.

Android on Raspberry Pi has potential as it is already known to support MPG2 (with an extra license) and MPG4 out of the box. Not sure if Android can tap the hardware decoders though...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/android-raspberry-pi/

I would assume until somebody gets Android TV to work (or develops a worth while non-touch UI) that either solution would be an interesting experiment but probably not particularly practical...

[Fuzzy]

I can't see it being all that ideal if it using the standard Android interface - which is awful on a tv if you've ever used a proper Android TV box.

[wayner]

But it could be better than an RPi3 if SageTV was cross-compiled to support ARM CPUs.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wayner

But it could be better than an RPi3 if SageTV was cross-compiled to support ARM CPUs.

If the sagetv linux placeshifter was cross-compiled to arm, this might be an OK client. But I'd have my reservations, since the way the linux placeshifter integrates the UI and Mplayer is very problematic. ie, I rarely get the video part working well under linux.

If this was running on top of Android, and you configured it to boot directly into SageTV client, then it might be OK, and as Fuzzy said, using "Android" vs "Android TV" on a TV is not a good user experience, so things like Netflix, YouTube, etc, will all kind of suck, even if sagetv does work.

All that being said, I'd consider picking up just to play with it

[wayner]

Would there be a version of AndroidTV available for these types of devices as opposed to Android?

Your reply does remind me of some of the posts when folks first got Android to run on a Pi as it seems that there was no hardware acceleration so it was painfully slow. I wonder if that is still the case?

What do OpenElec and Plex use for graphics playback? They both seem to run pretty well on the Pi. I played around with RasPlex a bit and it worked well - it even supported HDMI-CEC so I could use the TV's remote control to control the UI.

Running AndroidTV would also have the advantage of being able to also run Netflix, etc.

[panteragstk]

The thing about android tv on an Rpi is that the drm component is apparently missing so no netflix and any other app that requires that component.

That may have been fixed, but I'm not sure.

I'd be more apt to find a cheapo android box that supports all the hardware decoding goodness and then put the leanback (android TV) launcher on the device and make it the default launcher. That would sort of make it an android tv box.

You'd have to sideload the android tv apps on to it since it is most likely pointed to the tablet or phone version of apps, but it should be doable.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I'd be more apt to find a cheapo android box that supports all the hardware decoding goodness and then put the leanback (android TV) launcher on the device and make it the default launcher. That would sort of make it an android tv box.

That's pretty much what the mi box is.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

That's pretty much what the mi box is.

Yeah. The mi box works great, but I'm still curious as to what would happen if we took one of the crappy android boxes and tried to android TV it.

On another note the firetv now has an android tv mod.

https://liliputing.com/2017/07/hack-...ng-things.html