[Robgue]

I recently switched from a 16Gb class 10 to smaller class 6 card and man was there a big improvement. It was just an older 4 Gb card I had laying around.

Also beware if you have a Yamaha receiver. There seems to be some issue there still.

[baruchin]

+1 for pivos xios w/ Linux....however, u may have to consider swapping out the remote or using a wireless usb touchpad\remote... I also own an ATV2, and just like Ned Scott said, the cost is overwhelming now and performace with the latest iOS versions is lacking..

+1 Agree

Longtime owner of 3 ATV2's. Over the past weeks I have tried Raspberry Pi, G-Box MX2 & Pivos Xios DS. Since version 12 of xbmc I have wanted to roll dvr into my system(ATSC/Mpg2) but the lack of support in the ATV's meant I need to look at other hardware. The jailbreak/upgrade situation also became too much of a hassle. What I loved about the ATV's was the size and cost. So I tried 3 solutions. Please note I had limited time with each so take my comments with a grain of salt:

Raspberry Pi: I loved the size and price and the openelec build ran great! It is not the fastest client but seemed very stable. In the end I was looking at the Pi, a case, SD card, power supply, usb IR receiver, usb thumb drive for metadata, possibly overclocking and needing a powered usb hub. With all the accessories the Rpi approached the price of some other more powerful all in one boxes. It was very stable and even did well with live tv. I'm amazed at what the little box can do. Some really great work from the developers.

G-Box MX2: Great specs and nice box. There is not Linux build for this yet so I ran android and it did not seen as smooth. I also wanted a box that booted directly to XBMC. I did not care for their 3D launcher. I bought this based on the many many great reviews on Amazon but in my limited time it did not seem right for me.

Pivos Xios DS: I immediately loaded the official Linux build (5/10) and it was smooth and snappy. It took me some time to get this running smoothly and it's entirely my fault. I upgraded the firmware which moved the user-data folder but did not let it copy fully. Finally I did it right and all seems perfect. My final setup is the very latest nightly firmware with Frodo 12.2 and a micro SD card with my user data on it. I now own 3 of them and the second unit took about 15 minutes out of the box to load the new firmware. Once I have all of my addons configured I should be able to clone the setup in minutes. So this is the box I settled on. It does more than my ATV's could and I now have tv/dvr. I really appreciate all the development that goes into the Pivos. I can't wait for a dual core Pivos box.

My last ATV2 is up so sale

What nightly are you using?

[greco]

I'd put in $100 more and get a Zotec Zbox Nano AD11. or AD13 running OpenELEC it will kick all the mentioned units to the corner. Even running Aeon Nox its blazing fast where the others will just occasionally reboot without warning. Save yourself the headaches. Oh did I mention that all the boxes you mentioned only output 720p where the zbox runs a full AMD Radeon HD graphics processor which means full 1080p.

That's my $0.02.

[jatrevor]

I run it on a dual core mk808, nice and fast runs perfect, I recommend putting finless 1.2 firmware on an auto hide status bar, then just set startup manager to auto boot xbmc on startup, jobs a gooden.
You can pick them up for aprox £50 (GBP) with a decent air mouse remote.

[j1nx]

It is not really about the class. It is all about the erasure blocksize. The smaller, the better (for this particular purpose)

There appears to be a relation between class and erasure block size, but gigh class does not necessary means better or worse than ...

What is the optimal erasure block size? how can some check it ?
is there a recommended sd card - micro sd card?

I once wrote a post about it. Linked to it before, but here it is again;
http://www.j1nx.nl/howto-optimize-linux-sd-card-rootfs/

The optimum depends on the filesizes you are adjusting, but basically as small as possible.

A common erasureblock size is 4 MB, while a common filsystem blocksize is 4 KB. The problem with the SD card is, that is can only write sections of the erasure block size. So if you change a thumnail or fanart image of only 1 MB, it still needs to read the full 4 MB to memory, change the first MB and than write it back. If you are also unlucky that you changed your partition which is no longer aligned with those erasure blocksize. That fanart imgae might be stretched over two erasure blocks, hence halving your performance.

The "CLASS" certification is made up by the factory and is more for camera's and such. As the resolution of those things keep going up so are the filesizes of those pictures keep going up as well. The performance of writing those big files to SD can be increased by increasing the erasure block size. If you have pictures of 16 MB it requires 4 write cycles. Decreasing those cycles means performance gain for those devices, but it decreases the performance for small files.


Anyway: Long story short. It is all in above link

[clayfree]

+1 for pivos xios w/ Linux....however, u may have to consider swapping out the remote or using a wireless usb touchpad\remote... I also own an ATV2, and just like Ned Scott said, the cost is overwhelming now and performace with the latest iOS versions is lacking..

+1 Agree

Longtime owner of 3 ATV2's. Over the past weeks I have tried Raspberry Pi, G-Box MX2 & Pivos Xios DS. Since version 12 of xbmc I have wanted to roll dvr into my system(ATSC/Mpg2) but the lack of support in the ATV's meant I need to look at other hardware. The jailbreak/upgrade situation also became too much of a hassle. What I loved about the ATV's was the size and cost. So I tried 3 solutions. Please note I had limited time with each so take my comments with a grain of salt:

Raspberry Pi: I loved the size and price and the openelec build ran great! It is not the fastest client but seemed very stable. In the end I was looking at the Pi, a case, SD card, power supply, usb IR receiver, usb thumb drive for metadata, possibly overclocking and needing a powered usb hub. With all the accessories the Rpi approached the price of some other more powerful all in one boxes. It was very stable and even did well with live tv. I'm amazed at what the little box can do. Some really great work from the developers.

G-Box MX2: Great specs and nice box. There is not Linux build for this yet so I ran android and it did not seen as smooth. I also wanted a box that booted directly to XBMC. I did not care for their 3D launcher. I bought this based on the many many great reviews on Amazon but in my limited time it did not seem right for me.

Pivos Xios DS: I immediately loaded the official Linux build (5/10) and it was smooth and snappy. It took me some time to get this running smoothly and it's entirely my fault. I upgraded the firmware which moved the user-data folder but did not let it copy fully. Finally I did it right and all seems perfect. My final setup is the very latest nightly firmware with Frodo 12.2 and a micro SD card with my user data on it. I now own 3 of them and the second unit took about 15 minutes out of the box to load the new firmware. Once I have all of my addons configured I should be able to clone the setup in minutes. So this is the box I settled on. It does more than my ATV's could and I now have tv/dvr. I really appreciate all the development that goes into the Pivos. I can't wait for a dual core Pivos box.

My last ATV2 is up so sale

What nightly are you using?

I'm running nightly #85198bf (Compiled July 9 2013). I think it was the first to incorporate 12.2. I tried some of the earlier build but was getting no video with nPVR. With this latest build everything works great. The only bug I have noticed is a crash when trying to view movie metadata.

[clayfree]

I just have to add one more kudo. I just set up the CEC control of my Pivos with my Vizio 42" LCD and it works like a charm. I know some of the other boxes support it (Paspberry Pi, not sure about the GBox). I can't tell you how many years I have used IR repeaters so I could keep my equipment in a cabinet.

[wantboost]

seems like alot favor ouya to run xbmc how does the newest gbox run compare to it?

[wantboost]

How does the Minix neo x7 compare to the Gbox mx2?

[julakali]

You might also take a look at TheLittleBlackBox: http://www.thelittleblackbox.nl/en/
I have a Gbox Midnight running with a linux system build by the developer of TheLittleBlackBox and it's running fine.
So i guess his experience in hacking third party devices will result in a perfectly running system when he controls the hardware, too

[wantboost]

Anyone else?

[Packetcrypt]

I purchased an MK888B Quad Core 2G Ram 8G Storage. Was not very happy with the unit at first because the android bar at the bottom didn't auto-hide and 1080 was a little choppy. I flashed it with a ROM I found at freaktab and now this is my favorite Android device. Wifi reception is excellent and I can stream 10G and under files with little to no buffering. The new rom removed the android bar and contained a 1080 Kernal that really improved 1080 streaming performance. The stock remote is much better then the remotes that came with the Pivos, Jynxbox, ATV520 and MX2 Box I have.

[wantboost]

Hey its been awhile tried anything else?

+1 for pivos xios w/ Linux....however, u may have to consider swapping out the remote or using a wireless usb touchpad\remote... I also own an ATV2, and just like Ned Scott said, the cost is overwhelming now and performace with the latest iOS versions is lacking..

+1 Agree

Longtime owner of 3 ATV2's. Over the past weeks I have tried Raspberry Pi, G-Box MX2 & Pivos Xios DS. Since version 12 of xbmc I have wanted to roll dvr into my system(ATSC/Mpg2) but the lack of support in the ATV's meant I need to look at other hardware. The jailbreak/upgrade situation also became too much of a hassle. What I loved about the ATV's was the size and cost. So I tried 3 solutions. Please note I had limited time with each so take my comments with a grain of salt:

Raspberry Pi: I loved the size and price and the openelec build ran great! It is not the fastest client but seemed very stable. In the end I was looking at the Pi, a case, SD card, power supply, usb IR receiver, usb thumb drive for metadata, possibly overclocking and needing a powered usb hub. With all the accessories the Rpi approached the price of some other more powerful all in one boxes. It was very stable and even did well with live tv. I'm amazed at what the little box can do. Some really great work from the developers.

G-Box MX2: Great specs and nice box. There is not Linux build for this yet so I ran android and it did not seen as smooth. I also wanted a box that booted directly to XBMC. I did not care for their 3D launcher. I bought this based on the many many great reviews on Amazon but in my limited time it did not seem right for me.

Pivos Xios DS: I immediately loaded the official Linux build (5/10) and it was smooth and snappy. It took me some time to get this running smoothly and it's entirely my fault. I upgraded the firmware which moved the user-data folder but did not let it copy fully. Finally I did it right and all seems perfect. My final setup is the very latest nightly firmware with Frodo 12.2 and a micro SD card with my user data on it. I now own 3 of them and the second unit took about 15 minutes out of the box to load the new firmware. Once I have all of my addons configured I should be able to clone the setup in minutes. So this is the box I settled on. It does more than my ATV's could and I now have tv/dvr. I really appreciate all the development that goes into the Pivos. I can't wait for a dual core Pivos box.

My last ATV2 is up so sale