Last week I was sent an interesting new device to review called Vidon.me Blu-ray and Android powered set top box. First the specs: It has a Cortex A7 Quad-Core 1.3GHz processor, 2GB ram, 8 GB storage running Android 4.2. It has HDMI, 3 USB ports, 1 Micro USB port, SD/SDHC card reader, Ethernet/WiFi, 3.5mm audio output, optical output and comes with an IR remote.
It runs a custom version of Android 4.2 which has a custom UI designed for the TV and ships with a custom version of XBMC. It also comes with a selection of Android apps like the Chrome browser and the Google Play Store. Having the store means that you can sign in with your Google account and install any apps you want. You can then add your apps to the various sections of the UI, for example I added BBC iPlayer and YouTube to the TV section, Google Play Music to the Music section and so on. I have to say most of the Android apps work pretty well on the TV, Android scales up pretty well. I did find a couple of apps that didn’t play that nicely with the remote but you can emulate a mouse with the remote which worked ok. There is also a Vidon.me Android app which you can use as a remote control.
It comes with XBMC 12 which works exactly as you would expect for XBMC, I added my Vidabox server as a source and streamed ripped Blu-ray movies from to my TV. It has a nice feature where it will jump to the movie start point and bypass the long winded Blu-ray menus, it will also play Blu-ray and DVD ISO files so you could have your movie collection on a network drive or an attached USB drive. It supports AC3/DTS 5.1 SPDIF passthrough and DTS-HD/TrueHD HDMI as well as support for 3D Blu-rays. As it is running Android 4.2 it supports Chromecasting so you can send content from the device to a Chromecast giving you another option for media streaming.
I still need to spend some more time with it to work out what else you can do with it, I couldn’t get my wired network to work with it so I ended up using WiFi which isn’t ideal for streaming Blu-ray ISO files. Until we see Android TV this could be one of the best ways of getting Android on to your TV while having the power of XBMC and a Blu-ray player on one box. The box costs $120 from vidon.me.
In this video I unbox the device and try it on my network.
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