In a previous post I talked about possibly buying the Minix Neo x7 as my next Android TV. This turned out to be a disaster. While some apps that I use on a regular basis did work (very well), others did not work. I will go through some of the apps that I tried on the x7. I tried the stock rom as well as various finless roms.
MX Player Pro - Works
MX Player Pro ran fine on the x7. I even installed a true 1080p kernel and it ran fine. This app is really important to me since my wife and I use it to watch our video collection.
Youtube - Works
The Youtube app worked fine. The interface did run noticable faster on the x7 than my MK802 III. Double the cores really did help here. There was less lag when moving between pages.
Netflix - Works
The Netflix app worked fine.
Skype - Does not work
For some weird reason, I was not able to log into Skype. The app launched, but I couldn't log in. Since I couldn't log in, I wasn't able to test if the camera I have actually worked.
Hulu Plus - Does not work
I tried various version of the Hulu Plus app and they all ran into the same problem. As soon as you tried to play video, the device crashed. The key word here is the device, not the app. My TV went blue, saying there was no signal coming from the HDMI cable. I had to unplug the device to force a restart to recover. This behavior was not exclusive to Hulu Plus.
CBS - Does not work
One of the driving factors behind upgrading to the x7 was the CBS app. While I knew the app wasn't officially supported, I was pretty sure it would run on most modern Android TVs. I was running out of "app space" on my MK802 III, though. The upgrade to the x7 was supported to give me more breathing room since more and more media apps were coming out.
Unfortunately the CBS app exhibited almost the same behavior as the Hulu Plus app, with one minor difference. While the Hulu Plus app crashed right away, the CBS app would crash after the first set of commercials played. I wonder if the crash is related to DRM.
ABC - Does not work
The CBS and ABC apps were released around the same time. While it would be nice to have the ABC app, it wasn't as important as the CBS app. Everything we watch on ABC is already available on Hulu Plus. The ABC app crashed in a similar way as the CBS app. The app would play the commercials, but the actual video would crash.
Overall, the hardware is much butter. Quad cores really makes a difference. The external antenna was nice as well. The unit also stayed a lot cooler than my MK802 III. I'm disappointed mostly because the x7 is a really capable machine. Maybe a future rom will fix the issues.
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