hate about tvboxes

[ViperRunner]

Sincerally i don't really understand why so many people say bad thing of tvboxes with armbian.. i work daily with tvboxes and sold a few hundreds.. and i used dozens for installing coreelec, libreelec, armbian and home assistant in it and yes, they give a bit more work to set up than some well known boards specifically designed for development builds, but after everything is installed and set up, it's very rare for them to give any issues.. and you pay just a fraction of the cost and have hardware very close to the best recommended boards, and sometimes even better hardware.. what i recommend is using the more known ones and use good sdcards.. sincerally.. stop spreading so much hate for tvboxes..

Edited March 22 by ViperRunner
add some more info

[Werner]

split into new topic due to off-topic

[jock]

I don't know if this is trolling or not. Let's assume it is not and the question is genuine.

There is no hate against cheap chinese tv boxes, but there are many objective problems:

• no support: hell yeah, you can't say anything against this, at most you get the original firmware from the vendor, expect nothing more
• varying hardware quality: plenty of stories of hardware failing after few weeks/months. Lucky you your hundreds worked so far (I wonder what do you do to sell hundreds of those...)
• varying hardware in general: pain and suffer to support; you should at least say thank you to people here around that spend their time (that will not come back) to let you have a cheap tv boxes working with free and open source software (not to mention those who sell them...)
• no documentation: it means, mostly, that it takes huge amount of time and advanced skills to reverse engineer the thingies. Time is the fundament of a salary, skills are the multiplication factor of a salary. People here - all the people, starting from the heads of Armbian project down to the forum user answering to posts - give both for free, but no salary for us, despite the passionate efforts.

 

[ViperRunner]

well.. just to answer your questions.. just because i really think you mishandled or completely misinterpreted what i said..

 

i didn't undervalued in any way the dedication and good work of everyone on this forum.. for the contrary! it's exactly for all that hard work, that i know that's it's really a lot simpler than it would be if this forum didn't exist! after the work done here, essencially most of the cases, if the chipset is the same it's simply install the right drivers and fly away! i'm saying this forum has done a great job doing our job very very very easy by comparison to what as already been done!

 

now regarding your questions...

 

no support: chipset is nothing more than a computer, and thanks to a lot of good people on this forum and others, if you understand about linux, all the hard work is done for us.. basically we just have to test the versions of armbian that will run on our boxes and make good use of the eyes to physically open the box and check the hardware we have to install the right drivers and put it working as best as possible.

 

varying hardware quality: same answer as above..

 

varying hardware in general: once again, same answer as above..

 

no documentation: once again, same answer as above..

 

You said things for completely different questions than mine.. i simply don't  understand why there are a lot of people saying bad things even if it's exactly the same hardware present on the box that exists on some development boards...

 

i always were very close with computers, i know a lot of programming languages and in essence i am addicted to computers and generally everything related to technology.. for someone who knows how to deal with pratically everything i get my hands on in terms of messing with hardware and programming in several degrees, i really don't get it whats so hard just by oppening the 4 screws on the bottom of the boxes, and read the cpu, lan, wifi and Bluetooth and simply installing the basic system and it's drivers.. yes, its as simple as doing that after dealing with the bootloader, and that, with so much shares there are nowadays in the internet i can honestly say i never had any problem with any box i had in my hands.. and basically, there are a lot of boxes, i can say around 90% that have compatible firmwares, being the main and biggest problem for a lot of people, the wifi, the lan and the Bluetooth.. and after you know how to build your drivers, it's really so easy to get things going.. so yeah, in a tech perspective i think it's ridiculous to think that there are boxes impossible to get it working right.. it just takes a bit of work, but for anyone that knows how to deal with linux (and this forum is about armbian, essentially linux) i see all that hate as comparable to someone in a Windows forum putting hate for someone saying they are having difficulties installing a driver on Windows on computers that are not from a bigger brand.. 

 

and for the kind of affirmation you made it looks like you think i'm one of those superfans of iptv that sells boxes with servers subscription 😂 but nop, not one of those.. i never wanted anything to do with it, but i sold a lot of android boxes to guys like that, so yeah, i know what you mean 😉 essentially, i had here in my country since 2013, a big website during almost 10 years called lojandroid.com, "loja" from that name is the equivallent to "store".

 

Nowadays everyone knows what a android box is and it's sold even in supermarkets, but during at least in my first 3 years selling them, i can tell you i had sales on several portuguese marketplaces that didn't had another seller with android boxes beside me 😉 

 

As i said before, i always loved messing with hardware, and for several years i sold lots of android boxes with all kind of servers installations, and yes, had a few times customers coming back asking for warranty for heating and freezing installations and/or corrupt installations on the ROM, but if you understand of computers as i think you do, for sure you know on demanding tasks like some uses on home servers, some of the uses sometimes asked too much for too long for the ROM memory or even the sdcards, it's very, very easy to corrupt data on memory, be it ROM, Sdcard or evens USB, ant that happens if it's a big well known cipset and model or not.. when its sdcard installation (the easiest for correcting problems, or simply maintenance) simply had to copy from my backup of the system i had for that model, burn to a new sdcard, and the customer just had to put the sdcard on the box, turn it on and voilá, a new system on a push of a button.. because yes, every model box i sold i made a backup of its original firmware and of mine with my modifications.. 

 

And yes, in some demanding tasks its a lot safer to recover just by using a system installed on the sdcards, and usually on that situations its resolved just by replacing a sdcard, a lot easier than trying to recover the internal memory of a chipset, that not always goes the best way.. 

 

The brand i sold a lot during the first years, was minix, and i can tell you that the some problems i had with the cheapest, also had with minix.. but the big question there is that 1 minix box price would pay around 3 boxes with the same hardware on white brands.. 

 

There will always exist the purists and normal people that know that the world is a lot bigger than the bigger brands.. but for the looks of you affirmations it looks like for example you dont know that for example nowadays the chinese eletric cars are becoming far superior than the most known brands.. Nowadays BYD, Polestar and a lot more brands are superior than the Teslas, but the teslas purists will say that it's not the same.. it's also the same things like Apple people say from the other brands or operating systems.. 

 

Nothing against teslas and iphones, in fact i adore teslas and even had two iphones, but in case of the iphone, me being me, i don't like to be locked, i also always messed a lot with the firmwares on my phones, and in Iphones, besides the jailbrake that just leaves it a bit more usable, i never got much to play concerning the things i like to do 😂 

 

in conclusion, i'm not saying bad of the specific chipsets used for armbian! I just dont think that is white or black.. theres really of gray area in between, i for my experience know that the World is really a lot, lot, lot bigger than that, and chipsets simply are nothing more than a computer, and a lot easy to mess on that sense after getting the hang of it..

 

hope i gave someone a fun reading, and keep cool everyone 😉👍

Edited 8 hours ago by ViperRunner