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Agree with Walkyhts. Tvheadend is the main reason that the satellite experience is so bad on most Android devices. The app is a bottleneck for capable hardware and has never worked well.

Otherwise, it looks like decent specs for a media STB.

Titanium said:

Agree with Walkyhts. Tvheadend is the main reason that the satellite experience is so bad on most Android devices. The app is a bottleneck for capable hardware and has never worked well.

Otherwise, it looks like decent specs for a media STB.

Click to expand...

Having been using TVHeadEnd on a PC for a little while, my suspicion is that the problem is not so much that these devices use TVHeadEnd as that they tend to use an old version of TVHeadEnd that does not have any of the recent fixes for DVB-S2, and/or may be using questionable drivers. Both can contribute to issues. For example, I saw an article a while back that basically said that if the tuner device shares an interrupt (IRQ) with any other device, you can have all kinds of weird issues that go away when you get the tuner on its own, unshared interrupt. I checked that on my system and sure enough, the tuner cards were sharing an interrupt with some USB devices, and when I got that separated the whole system seemed more reliable, and I've had far fewer issues with bad recordings.

The big problem is that the TVHeadEnd repository for Debian/Ubuntu systems has three flavors: Stable, beta, and unstable. The most recent stable release is 3.2, but the most recent unstable releases are up to 3.9.2513 as I write this. Most devices stick you with a specific version of TVHeadEnd (maybe the stable version, or a beta version) and either offer no upgrade path at all, or you only get an upgrade when they decide to release a firmware update, and then only if they choose to update TVheadEnd. Yet even in the past couple of months there have been many fixes affecting DVB-S2 that you simply won't receive if you're not using the unstable repository and/or do not have a way to upgrade TVHeadEnd.

So I would say that the newest version of TVHeadEnd can work very well, assuming you don't have the bad luck to install a build with significant bugs. But when you buy a device like that, you get whatever version of TVHeadEnd the manufacturer decided to install, and whatever drivers they decided to use, and if they basically installed the software and only tweaked it enough to make it work most of the time, that's going to be a problem. One other issue is whether they were too cheap to include decent real-time clock hardware (something receiver manufacturers are notorious for), because that can cause issues with corruption of recordings (one reason I cringe a little when I see people trying to run TVHeadEnd on a Raspberry Pi, which has no built-in RTC. It might work great as long as they don't try to PVR anything!).

Titanium said:

Agree with Walkyhts. Tvheadend is the main reason that the satellite experience is so bad on most Android devices. The app is a bottleneck for capable hardware and has never worked well.

Otherwise, it looks like decent specs for a media STB.

Click to expand...

But still relies on dual cores. I guess I pass on till the quad comes to the scene.
There is another one similar for even less the $100 bucks, the Vigica C-60S or Vigica 70S both can be found for about US$60 in ALi, Flebay, Amazon, etc, , the Vigica site has also various SW updates, but again, is still a dual core box.

Vigica has a quad core out for reseller testing. Should be available for public in a few months.

I liked the WeTek a lot more before I read the reviews and problems with the Android satellite software. Looks like they still have much work to do.

It does let you boot into Linux. And if the AVL6211 demodulator and AV2012 tuner have open source Linux drivers, it should be possible to use Linux satellite software with it, no?