Testing Category - Page 105 of 169 - CNX Software

July 13, 2016July 30, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 52 Comments

Mini M8S II TV Box (Amlogic S905X) Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Teardown

Amlogic S905X powered TV boxes have now hit the market, and compared to existing Amlogic S905 devices add VP9, and provided your TV can handle it, HDR (High Dynamic Range) support. GearBest sent me one of the cheapest S905X TV Box with Mini M8S II, and in the first part of the review, I’ll take some picture of the device, and tear it down, while the second part will be posted later, and focus on testing the firmware. MINI M8S II Unboxing The package was slightly damaged, but nothing to bad. The top reads “Mini TV Box” with some icons describing the main feaures like 4K & H.265/HEVC support, WiFi, and so on. I’ve recently realized that logos and trademarks may cause problems with customs in some countries, and the package does have several potentially problematic trademarks like HBO and Netflix, as well as logos for Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo…. In […]

July 11, 2016July 11, 2016 by Karl Johnson - 11 Comments

Morefine M1+ Review – A Dual Boot Windows and Android TV Stick

Karl here and I will be reviewing the Morefine M1+. It is an Intel based stick PC with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 processor with 2GB RAM and 64 GB of storage. It dual boots Windows 10 Home 32 bit and Android 5.1. In this review, I won’t be doing many benchmarks because they have been done a lot in the past. Be careful when researching this product because there are 2 devices with same name with different specs. The other one has an Intel Atom z3735 and only 32GB storage and Android 4.4. The box came expertly wrapped and I have never seen a package delivered and protected so well. In the box was the stick, short HDMI extension, power cable, and instruction manual. No micro USB OTG cable is included. I didn’t find this an issue because I had several already. Specs OS Version: OS Windows 10 (Trial Version) […]

July 9, 2016July 10, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

ARNU Box Mach 10 64-bit Pure Linux TV Box Review

In part 1 of ARNU Box Mach 10 64-bit Pure Linux review, I listed the specifications, and took some pictures of the Amlogic S905 based TV box, and its board. I’ve now completed testing of this Kodi Linux media player, going though setup and add-ons, and see how it works compared to ARNU Box Mach 10 Pure Linux based on Amlogic S812 processor. Setup, Cloudword and Configuration The setup part is basically the same as on the previous model, but I’ll go through it again. Please ignore the vertical white line on the TV in the photos below, as it’s just due to my 18 months old LG 42UB820T 4K UHD television being partially broken, and out of warranty. The boot will typically take 30 seconds, but the first time, you’ll go through ARNU Box Setup Wizard. You could skip it in theory, but it’s still a good idea to […]

July 3, 2016July 3, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

AOMedia AV1 is a Royalty-free, Open Source Video Codec Aiming to Replace VP9 and Compete with H.265

The Alliance for Open Media, or AOMedia, is a new non-profit organization founded in 2015 by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, and more recently joined by AMD, ARM, and NVIDIA, whose first project is to develop AV1 royalty-free and open video codec and format to provide an alternative to H.265 / HEVC, and a successor to VP9. The project is a team effort combining teams working on Daala, Thor, and VP10 video codecs, and while AFAIK, AV1 specifications have not been released yet (target: Q1 2017), the organization has already released an early implementation of AV1 video decoder and encoder under the combination of an BSD-2 clause license and the Alliance for Open Media Patent License 1.0 , which can be found on googlesource.com. So I’ve had a quick my myself following the instructions, by first downloading one uncompressed YUV4MPEG sample:

mkdir ~/derf_cif
pushd ~/derf_cif
wget http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/husky_cif.y4m
popd

mkdir ~/derf_cif

pushd ~/derf_cif

wget http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/husky_cif.y4m

popd

and the source code:

git clone https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom
cd aom

1 2	git clone https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom cd aom

[…]

July 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 40 Comments

Review of Vorke V1 mini PC Powered by Intel Celeron J3160 Processor

After checking out Vorke V1 mini PC hardware in the first part of the review, it’s now time to publish the review starting with system information, benchmarks, and user testing. The device competes with similarly priced devices based on Intel Atom x7 processor such as Voyo V3 and Beelink BT7, so I’ll also include some comparisons to those in the review. Setup and System Information I connected USB keyboard and mouse, an Ethernet cable, HDMI and VGA cables to check dual display support, as well as the power supply. I did not connect my USB 3.0 hard drive since, I’ve already fitted the mini PC with an internal 1TB hard drive. Pressing on the large power button on the top of the device will boot it, and after a few seconds, you’ll get to go through Windows 10 setup by first accepting the EULA. The next steps are Custom or […]

July 1, 2016July 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Stress Testing Windows mini PCs with OCCT Overclock Checking Tool

I’m mostly a Linux user, but the marketplace has chosen Windows 10 as its preferred operating systems for mini PCs, so I’ve been reviewing fanless (or not) mini PCs running Windows 10 for around two years since Intel decided to provide low cost and low power processors. I normally run some benchmarks such as PCMark 8 or 3DMark, as well as typical user tasks, while monitoring CPU temperature and throttling using HWInfo64 utility, but those benchmarks are not really pushing the device to its limits. However, I’ve just learned out about OCCT “Overclock Checking Tool” that’s just doing that, and installed OCCT 4.4.2 on Vorke V1 to check it out. The tool has four taps: CPU: OCCT, CPU: Linpack, GPU: 3D, and Power Supply to stress test different part of the system. I just let it run for over 3 hours after pressing the ON buttons, and you can see […]

June 30, 2016June 30, 2016 by Ray - 5 Comments

ROOFULL MRX 4K Android TV Box Review

CNXSoft: I’ve got many requests to review TV boxes, but I don’t always have time for them all, so from time to time I get people who help me do reviews, and this review of Roofull MRX TV box powered by Amlogic S905 processor had been done by Ray, who like me has been playing with many other Android TV boxes. ROOFULL MRX Specifications Operation System – Android 5.1 CPU – Amlogic S905 64-bit Quad core Cortex A53 up to @2GHz GPU – Penta Core Mali-450 RAM – 2GB DDRIII ROM – 16GB eMMC flash SD Storage expendable up to 32GB Bluetooth – BT 4.0 Antenna – Built-in antenna for WiFi Media UHD 4K x 2K: Support Full HD 1080P: Support HEVC H.265/H.264: Support Video/Picture Decoding Support: *.mkv,*.wmv,*.mpg, *.mpeg, *.dat, *.avi, *.mov, *.iso, *.mp4, *.rm and *.jpg file formats Audio Format Support: MP3,AAC,WMA,RM,FLAC,Ogg Communication WiFi: IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4GHz/5GHz) Ethernet: […]

June 29, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Improve YouTube Video Playback on Low Power Intel mini PCs by Disabling VP9 Support in Chrome or Firefox

I’ve been reviewing several Intel Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, and Braswell mini PCs in the last year or so, and I always end up recommending Microsoft Edge browser over Firefox or Chrome for people wanting to watch YouTube videos, as the last two browsers always drop many frames with the video stuttering regularly. However I noticed that while Edge is playing MP4/AVC (H.264) video, the other two browser would normally stream WebM/VP9 videos, and it could be the cause of the problem as H.264 can be hardware accelerated, but VP9 not, and the low power processor might not quite powerful enough to handle 1080p VP9 video decoding smoothly. So I investigated the issues with Vorke V1 mini PC powered by an Intel Celeron J3160 processor (6W TDP) with the three browsers by first checking enabled codecs in YouTube HTML5 page. Microsoft Edge has both VP8 and VP9 disabled When I […]