hey everybody it's Lon Seidman and this is part 6 of our cord-cutting DVR series
where we look at ways you can bring in live TV as well as have a network DVR
throughout your home and in part 5 we were looking at ways of reducing the
cost of entry especially if you have a lot of televisions because it may not be
all that economical to buy expensive Nvidia shield TVs for every set in the
house and maybe you just need something really simple and cheap for a few of the
little TVs that are hanging out throughout the various nooks and
crannies of your home and in the prior video we looked at the Raspberry Pi
which is a very inexpensive solution that works quite well in about $35 but
you did have to buy a few extra things to make it work so you're looking
at a cost of entry on the Raspberry Pi about 45 or 50 dollars and I wanted to
see if I could find an Android solution that was really cheap but actually works
and I reached out to gearbest and they sent me this little box to check out
this is the 10x TX 3 this device costs $32 right now with the
remote on gearbest website so that's a pretty good deal here and I've got the
HD homerun DVR system running right now this is a live TV broadcast coming over
in mpeg-2 and it seems to be doing everything that I would expect a box to
do in this scenario so we'll be taking a closer look at exactly what this box can
and can't do here in just a second but I do want to mention in the interest of
full disclosure that this item came in free of charge from gearbest.com
however all the opinions are about to hear are my own nobody is paying for
this review and no one is reviewing this content before it is posted we're also
going to talk about HD home run as well as plex both of those companies have
sponsored content here on the channel in the past that may do so in the future
but this video is not a sponsored video so let's get to work and see how all
this stuff works so let's take a closer look now at the hardware again about $32
for what you get here and this does have a blinking clock on the front of it and
there's just no way to turn that off I have looked and tried but it looks like
you'll be having this thing staring at you all the time it's not that bright
but I would imagine in a darker room it might set off a bit of a glow the good
news is at least if you had a VCR in the 80s it's not blinking zero
whole time inside it's got an M logic s 905 W at 1.5 gigahertz I do believe
that's a quad-core chip has a Mallee 450 GPU 2 gigs of ram and 16 gigs of storage
there is a one gig version that costs a little less than this one but to be
honest with you you're better off with the 2 gigs it's not all that much more
money and you'll have probably a longer lifespan with this device especially if
you plan to use other Android apps on it so I would suggest just going with the
model that I've got here I've got two hooked up to my network here where I'm
streaming all of my media from of course and there's also some additional storage
capacity that you can add to it it does support 4k displays at 30 Hertz so you
can go up to 4k if you want but I think the sweet spot for this one is at 1080p
and it does support 60 frames per second there let's take a look at some of the
ports on this thing we've got a micro SD card slot here it'll take a card up to
32 gigabytes you have two USB ports here I've got those occupied with a USB stick
and a keyboard dongle which is helping me navigate a little more efficiently
here on the back you've got a AV output so I think you can actually go out to an
analog TV if you want but this will also serve as a way of just getting analog
audio out you do have an optical audio out on here also I know that's something
a lot of people are looking for these days so you have that on there
Ethernet it's not Gigabit I almost said gigabit but I believe this is 100
megabit Ethernet but good enough for doing media streaming and the kinds of
things you will do in our DVR projects HDMI out here as well as the course as
the power adapter mine came with a European power adapter I had to get
another adapter to make it work but it is just 5 volts at 1 amp so if you find
another one of these round connectors that outputs 5 volts at 1 amp they're
very easy to find you shouldn't have a problem there but if you are given the
choice make sure you pick the proper power adapter for your particular region
it is a switching power supply so if you do have an adapter with a European plug
it will work here in the US now the remote is very basic transportation it
is IR based so he has to get pointed directly here at the box for it to pick
up one thing that's relatively interesting about the remote is that it
has a mouse function here so if you push this
down you don't get a fancy air mouse but you can move a mouse pointer around on
screen with the remote here it's quite tedious but you can get some basic mouse
functionality if you need to that's why I always go with something like this
where you get a keyboard and trackpad integrated and the reason why it does
this let me go over to Netflix real quick and I'll show you why it's because
these cheap Android boxes typically run with a tablet version of Android not the
Android TV version that we see on the Nvidia shield and the me box and some of
the other major brand devices so when I go into something like Netflix here you
can see that we are running essentially in the tablet interface and generally
this is okay to get around with we can find the things we want to watch but if
I wanted to get up to that hamburger menu here for example it's hard to get
there without a mouse or some kind of pointer to help us get up in that
direction so that's why they integrated some very basic mouse functionality on
this box and that's my biggest gripe with these cheap Android boxes is that
you do not get a version of Android suited for a television you're going to
have trouble with a lot of the TV based apps so for example I don't believe
Netflix will play in 4k on this box because I think that's only supported on
the Android TV version Netflix itself actually is not downloadable from the
Google Play Store directly you have to go to Netflix is website to download it
direct from them it's because this box doesn't meet Netflix's standards for
apps that should appear in the Google Play Store so there are some gotchas
here when you buy these cheap boxes I don't think it's really well-suited for
general multimedia as a result but it does very well with the things that I
was hoping it would do well on namely TV watching through our DVR project so let's
take a look and see how it does with that alright so let's start off with the
HD homerun software because this is my primary viewing device here and I've got
it running in the background here so it should come up pretty quickly now and
here we go we've got my local PBS affiliate running right now and this is
an mpeg-2 broadcast so this will be exactly the kind of stuff you might be
getting from your over-the-air antenna if you're using an HD homerun and one of
the challenges that we've discovered with some of this over-the-air content
especially with low-cost devices is that not all of them Deinterlaced content very
well we found that that was an issue with the amazon firetv stick we were
seeing a lot of lines on fast motion scenes from these interlaced broadcasts
this is an interlaced broadcast but the box is deinterlacing things properly the
video quality isn't fantastic I think my shield does have a better decoder built
in but it is doing fine with these mpeg-2 broadcasts and I think at least
from what I can see here it's as good as what I experienced on the Raspberry Pi
so again to accomplish the goal of a very cheap way to watch TV with our
setup here this should accomplish that without any additional accessories
needing to be purchased here some of my cable system broadcasts here are
h.264 and 720p and these actually look really decent on here so by and large
from the HD homerun perspective it's working great however I do recommend
that you watch everything over Ethernet and not over Wi-Fi especially if you are
pulling in those over-the-air broadcasts this does not support wireless AC so
you're not going to have super fast Wi-Fi at your disposal so if you can
hook up Ethernet and I would recommend using MOCA if you don't have an Ethernet
jack nearby that's a system that allows you to use your cable television wiring
in place of Ethernet and it works just as good as Ethernet does in my testing
and I'll put a link to a video that I did on MOCA so you can learn more about
it and because we have the HD homerun app we also have access of course to the
DVR features that we covered in the prior videos here so I can go and find a
show that I want to watch here and just click on the button to pull it up and
watch it like anything else on the network it is very fast and responsive
like it is on all my other devices and again we're getting some of this
performance because we have Ethernet built in here but it is working as I
would expect something like this to work so it seems like it's a little faster
than the Raspberry Pi primarily because we're running a native app here versus
the plugin we had to run inside of Kodi let's take a look now at plex and see
how it does on this box so here is Plex running on the box and as you can see it
is running in the tablet interface not that nice TV interface that we saw on
the Amazon fire devices as well as on the Nvidia shield so what you got up
here of course is the little hamburger icon that you
have to navigate over to and you also have this little window down here that's
hard to get rid of unless you've got a mouse that you can use to grab at those
things so again not an ideal interface here just given that this device thinks
it's a tablet but it is usable if you don't have a lot of money to spend yet
you want an additional box for one of your TV's let's pop in here to the
program guide so we can see how the DVR works on here so we're gonna choose the
Weather Channel and click on the play button here and that will tune in
through the plex DVR now to watch The Weather Channel in real time here for
off of my cable system so it does seem to work like it does on other devices
but the interface is just a little bit clunky because we are kind of locked
into that tablet interface and I was also curious to see how well the box
would do just as a general media playback device so I have Kodi running
on the Box here at the moment and we have those jellyfish test files that we
like to look at here on the channel I'm gonna start with the big one here the
140 megabits per second HEVC file so let's load that up and see how it does
here it's definitely skipping a bunch of frames as you can see here I did try it
over the network initially and it was really choking on that but that's
because the ethernet is only 100 megabits per second so not ideal for
some of the 4k blu-ray files that you might encounter out there but it does do
okay at 60 megabits per second this is a 1080p file HEV C encoded at 10 bit and
as you can see here it is able to decode that file quite efficiently here so I
think 60 megabits per second or there abouts with HEVC it should do okay now
if you've been following me for a while you know that I like to watch my blu-ray
movies in MKV format basically the raw data from those discs I have stored on a
network attached storage device so I can watch it in any room of the house and
one of the good things about this box is that it supports lossless audio from
those files so I get Dolby true HD and DTS HD which is not something you often
see on a cheap box like this but the unfortunate side to this is that it
doesn't support 24 P through Kodi now I did try to switch the Box manually to 24
P it does support that but I was not getting smooth motion that way which is
what I would expect out of a 24p movie with a properly tuned box
that's my experience on the Nvidia shield is perfect for that kind of stuff
just doesn't get it done it doesn't automatically switch to 24 P and even
when I force it into that mode still isn't working quite right however if you
are looking to watch those movies every once in a while it does seem to playback
relatively smoothly through Plex by making use of its transcoder that's on
your servers so there are some ways to enjoy your movies on this thing fairly
well but it won't be as good as a more expensive Nvidia shield TV now as an
Android box itself it does seem to be pretty up to date it's running version
7.1.2 surprisingly the security patch level is
relatively recent may 5th 2017 I did check for updates over-the-air that
doesn't seem to be any the manual did hint that there are downloadable updates
that might be available but I couldn't find any so I don't know if this box
will ever get updated and usually these cheap boxes do not beyond the initial
version but it was good to see that we're at least somewhat up-to-date so
all of the known Android security issues on earlier versions may not be on this
one but of course you won't be shielded from any future ones there I'll pop back
out to the main menu here well let's take a look at a couple of games
I did try earlier running some Nintendo 64 emulation on here to see if you might
be able to do some good emulating on this device in addition to all of your
media watching didn't quite do so well with the Nintendo 64 so I think I'm
going to recommend this one for mostly the 8-bit and 16-bit era of video games
but nothing beyond that and casual games here like crossing roads seem to run
quite nicely on this hardware so I don't think you'll have any problems with some
of these popular Android games running on this box so if you are looking to
slip in a few Android games in between media watching I think you'll have a
fairly good experience here so for the asking price I think this is a pretty
good deal given how well it runs the HD homerun app which is the primary
mechanism in which I am watching TV through my DVR project it does OK with
Plex as well as you saw but there are some interface issues because Plex
thinks it's running on a tablet versus something that's hooked up to a
television but if you have some kind of trackpad combo or an air mouse or
something you might be able to get by with that as well so probably better for
HD homerun users but definitely usable for Plex
users that are looking for a very inexpensive way to get their favorite
programming up on their TV sets around the house one thing I would love to get
from all of you are some suggestions as to how we can maybe get this thing to
boot up directly to the HD homerun app that was something we were able to do on
the Raspberry Pi where it booted up Kodi and then immediately booted up the HD
homerun add-on and the reason why that's advantageous is because some people
around the house aren't so great navigating apps and whatnot they just
want to turn the TV on and watch TV like we all did back in the old days so I'd
love to hear some suggestions as to how maybe we can get this thing to boot up
that HD homerun app automatically so nobody has to touch anything to get
their TV working so leave those suggestions down in the comment box
below but until then I think 32 bucks here is a great deal and if you're
looking for a way to cut the price of cutting the cord this might be a great
way for some of your secondary TVs to get the love of a homebrew Network DVR
solution this is Lon Seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you
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