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Genaitech/Mygica ATV520, Android, XBMC, my experiences
#46
CEC works...but it doesn't. If you unplug the ATV520 and plug it back in, my TV switches over to the proper input. YAY! Then if you power the box off (with remote) my TV asks for a new input to be chosen...OK, I expected that. The only problem is if I try to power the box back on (with remote) nothing happens...the box does not come on. BOO!. The only way I can power the device up and use CEC is to power cycle it. (could just be because I'm running the Geniatech 20130805 firmware on MyGica box...but It shouldn't make a difference)

So CEC works if you put your ATV520's power supply on a switch, but then I would have to get up to flip the switch...no thanks. I can manage without CEC.

Hopefully there is a way to have the power button on the remote shut the box down completely instead of going into standby. Standby makes for great start-up times, but I would rather have CEC and the ability to use start-up managers to boot up XBMC on start-up and automatically switch my TV to the proper input.
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#47
This new box looks cool, is it available yet ??


(2013-09-01, 19:46)ciquta Wrote:
(2013-08-31, 00:41)ministerjee Wrote: thank you all whoever replied my post.one last question:
Is there any advantage to go for atv1200 over atv520? any major differnece between these twoHuh? Im guessing atv1200 wifi will perform much better then atv520 because of external antenna.(since i do not have the wired option).
They are identical expect for few more input/outputs.

If you have no wired option you better go for ATV1200 or the new version with external antenna:

http://www.dbg.co.za/images/MED-ATV520E_A3.jpg
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#48
(2013-09-01, 20:22)Greyleaf Wrote: As far as my understanding goes, even with your signal at 100%, you won't be any faster with a single antenna. I could be wrong though.

I agree. My situation is exactly this. My WiFi is perfect - 100% signal level. The router is feet away from the ATV520. N band - brand new equipment everywhere. Reception is not an issue. The issue is speed. In my experience, the ATV520 (and I guess the ATV1200) plays a video fine once it is loaded and cached. The problem is finding and selecting the video to play in the first place. And also the initial loading time. On WiFi this is awfully slow. In fact, if I was on WiFi I would not use one of these boxes - they are useless in practice (on Wifi). There is no way any of my family would use one on WiFi - life is simply too short!

My tablets have similar issues - so it is not a problem with the ATV520 in particular.

Another issue is bandwidth. I have 7 IP cameras on my system, plus 5 tablets and 4 phones in the house. Not all are going through one WiFi repeater, but at some point WiFi bandwidth becomes an issue.

What might be ok - and I might give it a test one day - is to setup a dedicated WiFi access point near the ATV520 - and connect the ATV520 to the AP via Ethernet. This takes a lot of processing away from android, so it should be a lot faster.

Not a fan of Wifi - all of my media players are connected via Ethernet.
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#49
(2013-09-04, 02:15)kneighbour Wrote:
(2013-09-01, 20:22)Greyleaf Wrote: As far as my understanding goes, even with your signal at 100%, you won't be any faster with a single antenna. I could be wrong though.
I agree. My situation is exactly this. My WiFi is perfect - 100% signal level. The router is feet away from the ATV520. N band - brand new equipment everywhere. Reception is not an issue. The issue is speed. In my experience, the ATV520 (and I guess the ATV1200) plays a video fine once it is loaded and cached. The problem is finding and selecting the video to play in the first place. And also the initial loading time. On WiFi this is awfully slow. In fact, if I was on WiFi I would not use one of these boxes - they are useless in practice (on Wifi). There is no way any of my family would use one on WiFi - life is simply too short!

My tablets have similar issues - so it is not a problem with the ATV520 in particular.
We all agree wired is better, but since you don't have a wired option all you can do is make sure you get an external antenna to get the most of it.

I have a old 54mbps router a room away from my ATV and it's well enough to stream liveTV and HD videos without buffering.

Of course if you need to play a 20GB file you need a wired option.
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#50
Just when i made up my mind to get atv1200 because of external antenna,they are coming out with newer models
atv580 and atv1800, i dont know if i should wait or get one right now.so hard to decide.
i need a box badly.
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#51
(2013-09-05, 19:43)ministerjee Wrote: Just when i made up my mind to get atv1200 because of external antenna,they are coming out with newer models
atv580 and atv1800, i dont know if i should wait or get one right now.so hard to decide.
i need a box badly.

Frankly, I was in the same quandary. My thoughts are the matter are

- if you wait for the next model, you will be waiting for the rest of your life. I have a WDTV Live - I should really have waited for my current ATV520 - but at least I learnt a lot from the WDTV and it was actually in use for a year, so it was not a total waste.
- I don't think you need a quad core. My dual core ATV520 is quite fast enough. I cannot image it being any faster, so cannot see how a quad core will be of much use. Nice, but not a feature that seems that important.
- cost. The newer models will (I assume) be a lot more expensive. My ATV520 cost me $80 delivered.
- Wifi. In my mind WiFi is a waste of time. I understand that is you HAVE to use WiFi, then so be it. It would probably be better to spend the money now on an external WiFi repeater - you will likely get a better WiFi experience.
- you will have no hope of porting to Linux for the foreseeable future. Even the dual cores are not at that point yet.

For me, the big thing was cost. The ATV520 was under the magic $100 limit (quite substantially). I can now treat it as a throw away item. If it works out (and it seems to be), then I look like a winner. This is also why the WDTV Live was not such a great loss - it was just on the arbitrary $100 limit.

When the quad cores come down to less than $100, I will probably look at getting one of them.

I think that the problem now is not the hardware - that is almost there. The problem now is the XBMC software - that is nowhere near stable. Even XBMC in Windows has a lot of bugs - but in android it is still very early days. I would prefer moving to Linux myself, but as yet that is not possible on my hardware.

(2013-09-05, 10:42)ciquta Wrote: We all agree wired is better, but since you don't have a wired option all you can do is make sure you get an external antenna to get the most of it.

I have a old 54mbps router a room away from my ATV and it's well enough to stream liveTV and HD videos without buffering.
I disagree. I think playing with the Wifi on the device is a waste of time if you are already getting a good signal. Adding an external antenna does nothing. What you can try is to get the signal via a different means. First up I would try an external repeater as that is the cheapest alternative. This can be very cheap, $20 China. I have one of these and they work very well - it just plugs into a power point. You then wire in via Ethernet from the repeater. Another thing to try is EOP - Ethernet over Power. This can work, although I have not tried it myself. It seems a very hit and miss fix - sometimes it works well - sometimes it does not work at all. I think it depends on your house power wiring. That will cost you a lot more though - around $80 - $120 or so.
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#52
Quote:I think playing with the Wifi on the device is a waste of time if you are already getting a good signal. Adding an external antenna does nothing.

I would tend to agree, but last night I attempted to watch a 720p movie (X264 4844Kbps) across wireless, just to see that it could without issue. It couldn't, and I was surprised. Although I must say that there is a concrete wall between it and the router, with at least six other wireless routers in the area competing for airwaves.

I was getting a good connection (box was reporting 65Mbps) and started watching the movie. All was good for about 5-10 minutes. Randomly, it would start to pause, hiccup, re-buffer, etc. The box was now reporting 26Mbps or less. I do expect this to some degree, given the wireless environment this box has to deal with in this building. The connection would go back up to 65Mbps and I would continue to watch the movie for another 20-30 minutes until the next wireless hiccup (anywhere from 3 seconds to 1 minute each time). When I get the chance I'm going to upgrade it to an external antenna to see if I can get rid of the dropouts. My logic is that I can stabilize the wireless to always give me that 65Mbps.

But then again, adding a repeater/extender would probably do a better job.
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#53
Just bought this unit. But when I close with the remote, wait for 5 minutes then open with the remote The WIFI is lost we is not able to scan the network. To have the wifi back I need to hard close (button in the back) or turn off then on the wifi again then we scan the network and the wifi is back.
How can I fix this problem , thanks
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#54
Sorry, I can't replicate your issue here. My guess though would be that the wifi signal to the box is weak. Try setting up the ATV520 next to your wireless router to see if you still have the same issue. If so, contact the manufacturer.
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#55
OK I think it fix with the new firmware. I still have the old one 20130327
thanks
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#56
@soccerFan: you could also try the 'wifi fix' by opening the box and repositioning the wifi antenna. See the first few posts (youtube video etc) in this thread. It made a substantial difference for myself and another user here.
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#57
Anyone else having issues with choppy mp3 playback on the ATV520? Videos are playing fine but music is glitchy every now and then...

Edit: I should point out that mp3 playback within the ATV520's default music player is fine, but within xbmc it's choppy.
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#58
I just picked up this box about 2 weeks ago. I cannot seem to figure out how to update the firmware properly on this unit.

I've downloaded the 2 files (SPI and firmware) and renamed the files with a .IMG extension. When I use the firmware update app on the Box, it only see's the SPI file, not the firmware file.

Am I doing something wrong? I've tried the 20130506 and also the 20130805 firmware files.
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#59
(2013-09-17, 09:43)mikrowave Wrote: Anyone else having issues with choppy mp3 playback on the ATV520? Videos are playing fine but music is glitchy every now and then...

Edit: I should point out that mp3 playback within the ATV520's default music player is fine, but within xbmc it's choppy.

Another user (I think it was Greyleaf) was having the same issues I think. He ended up changing the default player to DVD player for MP3s. It's somewhere in this thread, just read from page 1.
Edit: Yes it's post #29-31 or so. Might be of help..


@cooper: I updated manually by downloading both files, leaving their extensions as .ZIP and dropping them onto a USB key and doing the recovery boot thing. Make sure you select the option to clear the user cache or user settings or whatever it is FIRST, then reboot into recovery, update off the SPI file, clear the cache again, reboot again into recovery, and update off the other file. Should work. The reboot in between is important but both files should be visible each time.
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#60
Thanks saddie i'll give that a try.
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