Question Tv box android compare

[silviulian]

@ admin: can you put it in the right section?(cannot find delete thread)
How come some quad core tv box android can be better then some octa core devices? (in late 2019) .can you make a top of best tv box android?

 

[Alabalcho]

For me, unless it's listed on Google' "Android TV', it's not worth. Tried half a dozen "generic" TV boxes before getting one from that list. That is, you're looking either at $150 NVidia, or $60-ish Xiaomi Mi.

 

[silviulian]

That's the strange thing: i have a tanix tx92 octa core 3gb ram 64 gb rom and works fine.but ,why a xiaomi quad core and only 2gb ram shoud be better?

 

[TJ Hooker]

There is a lot more to a CPU than just the number of cores it has. And who says the Xiaomi is better?

 

[Solandri]

Most of the octa-core SoCs are actually quad core. They have 4 regular cores, and 4 low-power cores. When there's not much going on (e.g. phone is idling with the screen off) it will run off the low-power cores. When a processor-heavy task is running (like a game) it will run off the regular cores. All 8 cores are never in use at the same time.

In this case however (video playback), the determining factor is going to be how good the hardware video decoder is. Most of the mainstream phone SoCs can decode 1080p or better without problems. But the off-brand ones may not be as capable, and limited to lower resolution as with earlier SoCs, or have spotty performance with 1080p if the SoC is heavily loaded.

I wouldn't invest too heavily in a set top streaming box right now. The AV1 video codec was just finalized in 2018, with a revision in 2019. It is a royalty-free competitor to h.265 with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, and many other big names behind it. Because it was finalized recently, you shouldn't expect to see widespread hardware decode support for it until 2021-2022.

When GPUs start coming with hardware AV1 decoders, I suspect many of the streaming services like Netflix and YouTube will switch to it to avoid having to pay royalties for h.265. When that happens, any streaming box without hardware AV1 decode will have to decode the streams in software. And many of them won't be fast enough to do that, meaning they won't be able to play streamed video from those services. The last time this happened is when YouTube switched from h.264 to VP9, resulting in many of the older smart TVs (which hard hardware h.264 decode but not VP9 decode) becoming unable to play YouTube videos.

 

[BazmanFoo]

For me, unless it's listed on Google' "Android TV', it's not worth. Tried half a dozen "generic" TV boxes before getting one from that list. That is, you're looking either at $150 NVidia, or $60-ish Xiaomi Mi.

^This.
After years of trying to make chinese Android boxes work properly, I have moved to only using Nvidia Shield TV & Mi Box. I will never look back.