Could the Minix Neo 4K media streamer solve the UHD content conundrum? Stephen Dawson reports.

What is a media streamer? The idea is a device that will take network media – photos, music, video – and turn it into an AV signal for listening and viewing on your home entertainment system. There are several proprietary ones – Apple TV, for example, or the Western Digital Live TV. Recently, though, an increasing number of streamers have been, in essence, mini-computers based on the Android operating system.

Hong Kong company Minix has a number of such streamers available, but has one-upped everyone else by releasing its Neo X8-H streamer with 4K video capability. This might very well make this the device to solve the great problem of 4K: lack of content.

All About It
Android, as we all know, is what you find in most non-Apple smart phones. The Minix Neo X8-H features the latest version, Android ‘Kitkat’ 4.4.2.

It really is a mini-computer. The computer enthusiast of a decade ago could barely have dreamed of the power available in this small box – just 128mm by 128mm by 20mm tall. It packs a quad core Cortex A9r4 processor running at 2GHz with 2GB of operating memory.

In addition it has 16GB of storage built in. There’s also an Octo-Core Mali 450 graphics processor. Minix says that the unit is ‘powered by Amlogic S802-H, which seems to be the whole chipset including the GPU and CPU. The ‘H’ suffix means that the system is capable of hardware decoding Dolby Digital and DTS.

There’s a network port, but also WiFi is built in with support for the high speed 802.11n Standard and dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) connections. If your signal is good, 5GHz is generally the way to go because of reduced congestion. There’s a quite large external WiFi antenna which attaches to the unit.

There are three USB sockets for adding more memory or other functions, plus an SD slot and a USB OTG (‘On the Go’) socket. This last is a micro-USB socket (it comes with an adaptor cable so you can use it for USB) which allows an Android device to be plugged in and become a media source for the unit.

The USB sockets can be used for adding flash memory or a USB hard drive, or interface devices such as keyboard and mouse. There’s also analogue stereo audio output and a socket for a microphone.

General Purpose Computer
Since this is in some senses an up-market Android phone minus the touch screen, you can do a lot of what you might do on your phone, such as install useful apps, including games, browse the web, check your email. Whatever. The unit is extremely versatile. There are tens of thousands of apps. The Play Store app is pre-installed so you can go straight to the Google-hosted offerings. But there’s also an App installer so you’re not restricted to that.

The unit opens up with a choice of two interfaces. One is sort of like a standard Android interface, as you might see on a phone. The other has various things grouped into tiles. You can change between them or, if you prefer, install a third party interface.

A small remote comes with the unit. This worked adequately for choosing basic functions, but since this is basically a computer you’re going to get further with a proper pointing device and keyboard. The Minix A1 Airmouse is bundled with the unit at the moment. This has a USB receiver which plugs into the Neo X8-H. The remote then moves an on-screen pointer as you change the orientation of the remote. This worked well enough once I’d controlled my tendency to overshoot. Anything with text though was rather better served by plugging in the USB receiver for a mouse and keyboard combo.

Picture and Sound Quality
The ‘4K Movie Player’ app installed on the unit only worked with material on physically attached storage, not streamed from the network. This worked very nicely with my meagre collection of 4K test clips, delivering them all smoothly and with astonishing 4K detail.

The latest, customised version of XMBC (a non-official v.13.3) can both stream 4K video from the network and play it back from USB. Its performance was identical to the ‘4K Movie Player’ with the material on USB. It reliably streamed 4K material encoded at 50Mbps via WiFi (using the 5GHz band). But 100Mbps proved to be a step too far, with playback pausing every ten seconds while the buffer refilled. I figured that would be easily solved when I attached the network cable, but it turns out that the Minix’s wired network is not gigabit rated. The 100Mbps throughput wasn’t sufficient for smooth playback of the 100Mbps content.

Blu-ray standard full HD video was a breeze (the bitrate is typically below 35Mbps), while SD video hardly exercised the unit.

Having said that, the progressive scan conversion from interlaced 50Hz material was pretty basic: just a straight ‘weave’, which resulted in visible combing on some TV-sourced material.

Switching to 576i50 output for this material allowed me to use an external progressive scan converter, which improved things in terms of mostly eliminating the combing, but there seemed to be an occasional jerk in the image as though a frame had been dropped or repeated.

One inconvenience is that regardless of the actual resolution you want, you will need to change the output settings according to whether you’re watching Australian or European content (at 50Hz), US or East Asian content (60Hz) or movie content (24Hz), otherwise you will have noticeable judder of images on the screen.

You’d think it a cinch for a unit such as this to deliver full 4K still photos as well. Sadly, no. My tests show that the unit takes high res photos, downscales them to 1080p, then upscales them again to 4K output, washing out quite a bit of detail. I corresponded with the developers in Hong Kong and they say they are planning in a future upgrade to add 4K photo support. If and when this comes through the current model should support it.

For sound you can find an app to play just about anything. However it is the Android system and the hardware which determines the output standard. So XMBC happily played all my content, whether FLAC, Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3. WAV, even Dolby Digital audio files (.aac). Even the high resolution FLAC files up to 24 bits and 192kHz. The only problem was that everything was turned into 48kHz stereo PCM. Even CD-standard 44.1kHz was upsampled to 48kHz. With HDMI set to ‘passthrough’ for the audio there was no change.  All this sounded okay, but if you want to stream high purity digital audio, or multichannel audio, then this is not the device for you.

Working with others
As I’ve noted, just about anything can be implemented in software. Want Apple’s AirPlay? The AirPin(PRO) app, installed in the unit out of the box, offers this. Select ‘AirPlay’ the usual way by swiping up on your iOS device’s screen and choose ITV@35. The sounds of your device will come from your system via the Minix device. Choose the ‘Mirroring’ button as well, and your device’s screen will come up on your TV (fed by the Minix of course). This worked extremely well, except that I couldn’t get videos running on my iPad Mini to display that way.

Android devices aren’t left out. The same app allows DLNA streaming from your phone or tablet. This worked with both my LG phone and Samsung tablet. There’s also a Miracast app for mirroring your Android device to the unit, however while it could find both the tablet and the phone, it wouldn’t connect to the phone, and only displayed a black screen for the tablet.

I plugged the Samsung tablet into the USB OTG connection of the unit using the supplied cable and immediately the device started scanning the Android’s contents for videos and photos. These could be selected and imported to the unit.

Conclusion
If you have a collection of 4K videos and a 4K TV on which you’d like to show them, you are probably presently relying on the ability of the TV to run the video from USB. If it actually supports it (not all do). In that case, your solution may well be the Minix Neo X8-H. But do be aware that you will not get the highest quality digital audio out of it, and you may find yourself up to your elbows in the video settings more often than you’d like in order to get optimal performance.