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If one really wants to go with the tv box route, better at least pick device that's proven to already be fully functional with armbian IMHO My own interest on H616 is because have one here already + it runs cooler than my current armbian box (H6). I tried that old 4.1.970 kernel on this H616 box I have here and both USBs seemed to work but didn't get LAN to work. Basically the new patches that MythTV project gave also had similar functionality with newer kernel (got both USBs and HDMI working with it but no LAN). I guess if one really wanted to dig deeper into this, would need to figure out how to do own uboot with recent patches available for these devices. But this isn't really the greatest hardware either since it only has 2x USB 2 ports and LAN is 100/10, meaning the throughput to network is going to be limited even with external LAN adapter (could still be enough for some applications like home automation). Like mentioned before, I have full dump of the T96Max's DTS file here too and it's not really that different from stock orangepi one so using that could also help here, I just have zero clue how to do the custom uboot atm with armbian. A lot of the knowledge around this seems to be scattered around and a lot of things are left unexplained, probably because these are considered to be too advanced for people new to custom builds.

Cool stuff, I'm assuming you mean now patches that you have here? https://github.com/hexdump0815/linux-mainline-and-mali-allwinner-h6-kernel Is there any plan to push these to Armbian eventually? I'm still piecing together how these all work together. I've so far fiddled with custom AW H6 armbian builds for my T95 Mini (everything working great on it) and tried to get something to build for this H96 Max box but best I've gotten on my own builds is the armbian logo on HDMI using legacy kernel

I did notice that on H96Max H616 box I have here MiniMyth's orangepi_zero image actually boots with both USB ports functional (vs one USB port on those select Armbian images) so their H616 patches definitely do improve things. Ethernet is still dead on it but that's no surprise since it's not a matching board. I was also able to extract DTS from this H96Max box and it looked very similar to orangepizero2's DTS file on armbian, items in different order but values were close to identical.

Out of curiosity, do those MythTV ROMs work for you out of the box? For example https://github.com/warpme/minimyth2/releases/download/v12.2.0-v33-Pre-370-gf6cc7df4de/MiniMyth2-armv8-master-12.2.0.r370-board-h616.tanix_tx6s-SD-Image.img.xz

Worth noting that I couldn't get anything but one USB and HDMI running but that let me put in usb hub with gbit lan to it and hook it to network that way, also tested usb ac wifi dongle and that also worked but it's more pain to manage. With physical wire you can just remote SSH always as long as you've done the initial armbian setup.

@Munez I posted my findings earlier here: basically what I found on my end was that most of the kernels of these Orange Pi Zero 2 ROMs didn't seem to do anything on H616 boxes I got access to but somehow the ones specifically with 4.9.279 and 4.9.280 kernels booted and gave one USB and HDMI out on one of these boxes and other clearly did some additional loading too but with no HDMI out. None of the other ROMs showed any activity on boot but granted I haven't hooked up serial connection for further analysis. For example 4.9.255 was just dead on my end. I've used ROMs from this archive for testing: https://armbian.hosthatch.com/archive/orangepizero2/archive/ This works on the H96max (H616) box here: https://armbian.hosthatch.com/archive/orangepizero2/archive/Armbian_21.08.1_Orangepizero2_bullseye_legacy_4.9.280.img.xz Would be nice to hear others experiences on this, if 279 and 280 work for others too there must be some reason why only these are more compatible with H616 TV boxes.

I got access to two H616 based android tv boxes here: the one that is labeled as H6 and other that is H96 Max H616, both identify hardware as sun50iw9p1. Been testing various images and so far only one so far that does appear to boot with HDMI out is Armbian_21.08.1_Orangepizero2_buster_legacy_4.9.280.img. This image gives HDMI out and one functional USB port on the H96 Max so I can use terminal but Ethernet doesn't appear to work (and can't force eth0 to 100mbit). H6 appears to do something on boot but no HDMI out and I haven't hooked in serial to see what's happening there. Worth noting is that this was the only precompiled image with 4.9.280 I found, all the rest were either 4.9.255 or 5.x. I'm guessing hooking up that serial connector is the only way I can figure out further what's going on here.