I’ve finally received the Mele A1000 media player I ordered 3 weeks ago. I mainly plan to use it as a Linux development platform for Allwinner A10 processor, but today I’ll just post some unboxing pictures and provide some feedback about the Android software running on the box.
I received the device in the box below. (Sorry about the picture quality, I took pictures with my smartphone).
Once you open the box, you’ll get see the set-top box, related accessories, a (not so useful) user guide in English and Chinese and what looks like a warranty card.
Once you unpack everything you get the set-top box, 2.5″ hard drive case, composite cable, remote control (infrared) and 5V power supply.
You’ll noticed some buttons on the remote control have markings in Chinese, this is where the user manual can be useful.
You may already have seen the box itself (with clearer images), but I’ll show again the back of the box with most of the connectors and…
…the left panel with another USB host port, the SD Card slot and the power button.
Time to add 2 AAA batteries to the remote control, connect the power supply and connect the media player to the TV with an HDMI cable. After slightly over 1 minute, you should see the GUI.
Everything is in Chinese, but you can easily change the language to English and setting up WiFi was a breeze. The Home Screen will mostly still be Chinese and this is normal, as most applications are in Chinese (mainly to access Chinese TV and movies online) and the MUIU weather widget in only available in Chinese, but the rest of the menus will be in English (mostly). I had to restart the device to apply changes.
My device was shipped with firmware version 1.2. You can do an OTA update (Blue icon with 2 curved white arrows) but it will only allow you to update up to version 1.3, although Mele has released version 1.5 which can be downloaded online and installed with an SD Card (more on that later).
So I kept playing with firmware 1.3. The good thing is that the Android Market (now Google Play) seems to work just fine and you’ll be able to install and run most of your favorite apps. I tried gmail, Angry Bird, Fruit Ninja, Bloomberg for Mobile, Antutu benchmark, Terminal and a few others which seemed to work fine. Quadrant benchmark installed and started fine, but once you want to run Benchmarks it does not work.
Soon enough I realized that the remote would not be enough (e.g. try to play Angry Bird or write emails with the remote), so I connected a USB keyboard and mouse. It’s the first time I use an Android based media player and it feels quite awkward to use as you don’t exactly have easy access to all your media files and sometimes I found myself having to use the 3 input devices in one application.
Mele does provide a custom File Manager which allows you to browse files on your SD card, flash memory and external USB mass storage (but not NFS or CIFS/SAMBA network shares) and it can filter by Video, Music and Picture. Once you click on a file, you have to select which software you want to use to play and display the selected media file. The selected software can be made default, so that you don’t have to choose each time you click on this type of file. If you want to access file in a Windows Share (CIFS/Samba) simply install AndSMD or ES File Explorer, I used the later and it works well. The only thing that I could not achieve is a picture slideshow on a SAMBA share, as I had to open and close picture one by one (which is a pain).
I only tried about 10 videos, and about half of them could not play correctly. Some FLV and VOB files would not play at all and MOV files I shot with my Kodak camera could play but the image is corrupted. I was unable to play Youtube video in the web browser, however installing the YouTube application works just fine.
I finally upgraded the firmware to version 1.5 with an SD Card as a previous attempt to do so with a USB Thumbdrive failed miserably. Once you download the file, extract them, run the Phoenix Utility and burn the firmware to your SD card (it will wipe out all the files on your card). To upgrade the firmware, insert the SD card in the Mele A1000 SD card slot and power on your device. During upgrade nothing is display on the monitor (HDMI output), and you can only see the front panel LED blink and once the blinking stops, you can safely assume your firmware has been upgraded. Restart your device, select the language, configure your network settings and you should see the new UI without the weather widget and less Chinese software. You’ll lose all settings and apps should installed with the previous firmware.
Now some more geeky stuff with Antutu benchmark and system details.
With an Antutu score of 2337, the performance of Mele A1000 (Allwinner A10 + Mali-400MP) is similar to the one of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i (Qualcomm QSD8250 @ 1GHZ + Adreno GPU), but previous tests showed scores around 2600/2700 closer to the performance of Samsung Galaxy S (Samsung S5PC110 ARM Cortex-A8 processor @ 1Ghz + PowerVR SGX 540 GPU) which is more in the range that we could expect. I’ve read somewhere the Allwinner A10 could be overcloked to 1.5 GHz, but I don’t know how to do this for now, nor if it is safe.
Although I could not run Quadrant benchmark, I could retrieve the system details.
This shows Android 2.3.4 and Linux 2.6.36 kernel run on the device, A10 gets about 1000 Bogomips and the available system memory for Linux is 305 MB out of 512 MB, which means 207 MB are used by the GPU.
I also captured the display and GPU details.
Quadrant also shows OpenGL ES, OpenGL ES 2 and Pixel format, but I haven’t shown it. If somebody wants to know, leave a comment, I’ll provide a link to the screenshot.
If you are interested in purchasing the box, you could buy it for 70 USD + shipping on Aliexpress or like I did on dealextreme.com for 100 USD including international shipping. The total price on Aliexpress should be cheaper, and if you are a developer, you can ask the seller to include a USB to TTL board for debugging. In case you get an exorbitant shipping fee, you can tell the seller so that he can find a better option.
That will be it for today, I’ll keep updating this blog as (or should I say “if”) I make progress…
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Any development you do on it i would be much more than interested!
Please post your progress here, thanks.
hi:
i am interested in this machine, can you make a video review?, the machine have good speed?, working youtube?, flash is working?, whats vercion of flash compatible?.
do you want to install linux os?
thanks for the info
greetings
@ deadfunk
You can watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB5_suTRKF4 It’s for the Mele A2000 but it’s almost the same hardware (The Mele A2000 just has a bigger flash).
The speed is good, but I just don’t find the usability of the software to be very good from a user perspective.
Yes, Youtube is working but not in the web browser, the blog post above.
The plan is to install Ubuntu 12.04 on it.
@ cnxsoft
thanks for the video, the sistem seems to respond fast, but like you say is for touch, with mouse is strange.
if you install ubuntu , make a an installation guide. i apreciate that. the use of mele a 1000 in a distribution like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC_Live#XBMC_Live is my goal.
it have a remote control, sata plugin and power to reproduce full hd.
i keep seen your exelent page.
greetings
have u installed flash before checking youtube in the web browser?
@ Haris Sarwar
I think I’ve seen flash animations working and usually for this type of system flash is pre-installed. I very much doubt I can just go to Adobe Flash website and install flash for that platform, but I’ll give it a try anyway.
What about the file playback issues after the firmware update to v1.5
@ cnxsoft
Since this is an Android platform, I just went to the Market to Install Adobe Flash Player 11… YouTube videos still do not play in the Web Browser (I just see the loading sign), but this is not really an issue since the YouTube app is better.
@ Haris Sarwar
Yes, it still have the same video file playback issues.
Hi!
Thanks for the review. I am anxious for more news.
I care very much about power consumption. If you can measure that, I will appreciate it very much.
Thanks again.
Sorry I don’t have the equipment to measure power consumption.
But I guess they did not pay too much attention to this as my keyboard numlock LED is ON when the device is in standby mode (which means the USB ports are powered in standby mode). Of course, you can always power off the device with the power button on the left side to take care of this.
Good review, thank you, Jean-Luc.
Have you tried installing other media players from the Android Market to see if they’ll play the files that you have trouble with? I’m considering buying one of these as a media player so I’m very interested in all of the media playing details.
No, I haven’t. There are 3 media players installed:
* ES Media Player
* Movies (I guess it’s a custom player)
* TvdVideo
Would you recommend I install another one specifically ?
BTW, yesterday I tried to rip a DVD into MKV + AC3 which could play fine in VLC, and in the box, the video would play, but there was no audio.
So I’m not convinced this is the best platform for playing videos. Something with Sigma Designs or Broadcom solutions would be better (but more expensive), unless you are prepared to convert some of your files.
@ cnxsoft
Some of the popular players are MoboPlayer, Dice Player, MX Player, and RockPlayer. I’d probably start with MoboPlayer because it was able to play some formats on my tablet that would cause the other players to freeze and reset my tablet. I’m most interested in h.264/MKV playback if you can test that out, especially in HD resolutions. I realize that the player as it is might be limited, but there’s some interest in porting XBMC to it, so if one of the apps that I mentioned can work “good enough” before XBMC is ported, then I’ll pick one up while I wait for XBMC.
[…] http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/04/08/mele-a1000-android-2-3-stb-unboxing-and-review/ […]
@john @cnxsoft
Have you tried Arc Media Player, It is the main Video Player I use Across all my android devices and it will play all video formats (h264/MKV/OGM/AVI/Xvid/Divx/MP4/Mpeg/WMV) but also allows streaming through SMB shares but look for the older version under 2.0
@ John
I’ve installed MoboPlayer and the MKV (MPEG2/AC3) I tried before can play with audio. I don’t have any 720p, 1080p (h.264) videos right now, I’ll try a bit later.
@ John
I’ve tried one 1080p MKV H.264 + ACC and it plays just fine.
@ Lagstarr
I installed Arc Media Player, and although it supports SMB shares, I could not make it connect to my Windows XP share.
You could however use it to test one MKV file (via ES File Explorer) but it failed to play.
@ cnxsoft
Sounds great. Is the output quality good when playing video with MoboPlayer? And have you tried to install Flash Player and see if Flash works in any browser (such as Dolphin or Opera)? If you can test out this live streaming Flash video in Dolphin and/or Opera, then that would be great:
http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles
Also, is the Aliexpress product exactly the same as the Dealextreme one?
@ Lagstarr
Thanks for the tip. I just gave arcMedia a shot and it seems to work for me as well.
@ cnxsoft
There are multiple versions of arcMedia depending on the cpu architecture. Have you tried the other ones? Thanks for all your testing.
I wanted to add that I could get arcMedia to access my shared folders but I can’t seem to get anything to play from the shares.
I see in the screenshot above that your refresh rate is 61.9 Hz. Since most video is encoded at either 23.976, 29.970 or 59.940, this would be very bad for video playback. You would see micro-stutter every few seconds as frames are repeated/dropped every few seconds. Would be noticeable on panning camera shots, especially at higher speeds like 59.940. Do you know if the hardware supports other refresh rates? There is a good set of panning test videos here: http://st7.us/MotionBarsH264.7z . They run perfectly smoothly on the Sigma based media players over HDMI.
[…] Set-top Box April 17th, 2012 cnxsoft Leave a comment Go to commentsI’ve recently received and reviewed the 70 USD Mele A1000 STB powered by AllWinner A10, but haven’t been able to hack it yet since I’ve have not […]
@ John
I installed the Opera browser and I can watch the eagle nest live at http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles
In Youtube, clicking on a video will open the player and play it there.
If some are interested, I’ve also tried some Facebook flash games (Pet Society and Bubble Island) both can load but fail to play with respectively a blank screen and a network error.
I believe the products on Aliexpress and DX are the same. On Aliexpress, it’s sold by an individual (Chinese SW developer) that’s probably why it is cheaper. To make sure you can ask on Aliexpress directly.
@ Mark
I’ve tried the 720p @ 59.940 and I can see one frame being skipped every 3 to 4 seconds, something I don’t see when I play the file in my PC.
I don’t know if the hardware supports other refresh rates.
Not directly related to your issue, but still good to note, only the default players (ES Media Player and “Video”) can play those videos. Moboplayer will play for 1 second then stop, and ArcMedia will play it very slowly.
This STB sounds almost exactly like what I need (something that can both reliably play media and stream Flash from websites while costing $100 or less) but the refresh rate issue is unfortunate. I hope that it can be resolved. I don’t even understand why it would output at such an odd refresh rate.
@ John
If Mark did not mention it, I may not have noticed the frequency issue while watching movies. But one you are aware of it, you’ll see it. If you only happen for this video encoded at those frequencies and would mostly be noticeable on panning camera shots.
Unfortunately for me, it might be one of those situations where “what has been seen cannot be unseen”. After reading about the refresh rate here, I watched an episode of a TV show on my Xbox with XBMC ripped from a DVD set. I wasn’t specifically looking for judder, but I noticed it even though I had never noticed it before in earlier episodes. I checked the framerate and it was 25fps, but my Xbox is NTSC and outputs at 30fps. Up until then, I had always assumed that the show was either 24 or 30fps and I had never noticed a problem with judder, but now I see it very clearly. Maybe I can train my brain to forget about it with time, but at least for now, I’m too aware of it to ignore it. 🙁
Anecdotal, but still interesting (to me). It appears Mele decided to cut costs by not purchasing a MAC address block, but instead using 00:CE:39, an unused MAC address block.
Hi,
Could you tell me if It’s possible watch 1080p movies correctly ?
I’ll like to buy the Mele as HD player.
Thanks.
@ Pedro
That’s actually not a simple question… First, yes this device can play 1080p videos (and even 2160p).
I can see at least 2 issues however:
1. As explained in my post, some videos won’t play and you may have to convert them to be able to play them back.
2. As somebody explained above there are some playback frequencies issues, which will lead some frames being skipped. It’s actually barely noticeable until you are told the problem exists…
Is it possible to share a 2gb image? 412MB of deb package in the apt cache (/var/cache/apt/archives) could be easily removed with ‘apt-get clean’.
2gb would allow for a cheaper sd/mmc card.
@ tret
Maybe also remove openoffice?
@ tret
Yes, sure it would be possible. I’ve already tried Ubuntu 12.04 (with rootstock) and Debian 6.0 (with debootstrap) and you can get smaller images. It’s actually quite easy to do once you get the rootfs, just copy the drivers from the original image to the new rootfs and it just works (sort of). For now, more work is needed on the kernel (e.g. WiFi works , but there is an issue with Ethernet), and the system often hangs when I run X.
So I’m sure that in due time a smaller image or even an installer will be released.
Thnx for your answer. Another question:
OTA updates provide with 1.3 firmware. I downloaded 1.5 firmware. As you write, I won’t use Livesuite due to problems. I want to use PhoenixCard utility. Where can I find this utility?
PhoenixCard utility is provide within the 1.5 firmware rar on this review or on the mele site : http://www.mele.cn/download/mele_HTPC_v1.5.rar
just fyi 1.6 firmware recently released. The download page (both english and chinese) still points to the 1.5 firmware even though claiming 1.6
correct link is: http://www.mele.cn/download/mele_HTPC_v1.6.rar
@ brian
I’ve tried it. As usual it will just wipe out all the applications I previously installed. It’s still Android 2.3.4.
The user interface looks a little better (just the background image as changed) and appears to be more responsive than before.
I could not login to the Android market, maybe it’s a temporary problem with Google Play.
Can u please check google play again?
I was thinking of upgrading to firmware ver. 1.6
@ Haris Sarwar
Yes, I could finally connect to Google Play. So you can go ahead with the update 🙂
I have upgraded my mele 2000 to ver 1.6. Built in file explorer utility keeps blinking when it is used to open usb or sd card. Explorer works correctly only on the first launch.
Strange thing happened with the sd card. After upgrading the firmware i formatted the sd card and copied some movies in it to check the compatibility. When file explorer started blinking i power cycled the box. On boot up board started blinking as if box have started the firmware update process but there was no firmware update image on the sd card. After that board stopped booting.
I had to update the firmware again to boot again.
Is there some bootup mark on the sd card which has to be erased to stop board from booting and corrupting the internal flash?
how can i make sd card to non bootable?
@ Haris Sarwar
To make sure the SD won’t boot, you can run this command in Linux:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1M count=1
x = letter for your SD card.
Or, simpler, I think the Phoenix utility can format your SD card back to normal.
I am using win 7 and try to format through phoenix utility.
How can i do boot up from sd card without changing the internal flash?
Mele manufacturers should have used separate memory for saving wifi and android store configuration. After the update you have to go through same process again.
Have u tried using skype in mele?
@ Haris Sarwar
If you want to boot from flash simply use the ubuntu image: http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele-ubuntu-lucid.img.lzma, decompress it and dump it to the SD card.
Yes, I agree the firmware update destroying your settings and delete your apps is a pain.
I haven’t tried skype.
[…] to Xibo.org.uk. To know more about the Mele A1000, you can check the specifications and read the review of Mele A1000 I wrote last month. (function(){var […]
Is there some way i could save android configuration in some file and restore settings from there?
I will try ubuntu image later.
I have tried a4tech usb mic + camera to mele but it doesn’t detect any thing.
I also tried logging to skype but it is stuck at login screen.
@ Haris Sarwar
You could try Titanium Backup – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup to save and restore your settings and apps between firmware upgrades. I suppose you need a SD card to store the data.
Thanks
Some apps in store require root in android, can mele be rooted to use these apps?
I have just checked the titanium backup app it also needs root
@ Haris Sarwar
I thought the Mele A1000 already had root access by default.
I was looking for usb camera and mic support in andorid and came across
http://artway.en.alibaba.com/product/520083544-213323202/New_Low_cost_Android_2_2_Internet_TV_box_support_USB_camera_microphone_and_DVBT.html
So it is possible in android if box contains the proper drivers.
Do you know anything about usb camera and mic support for mele?