All right after some delays got my Mele A2000 box.
I did these tests initially on the 1.5 firmware which it ships with then updated to the 1.6 firmware, the 1.6 is only available via manual update, apparently Mele will be releasing a new firmware with Android 4 soon. The player can be updated via online too.
Packaging:
Nice build quality and packaging doesn't feel cheap, though keep in mind there are no batteries for the remote supplied and it doesn't come with a 2 pin power adapter.
Remotes:
The stock remote is serviceable though the d-pad could be better but I would absolutely not use this just on its own unless you enjoy slowness and frustration, a wireless mouse is essential. I used a
Microsoft Wireless Mobile 6000 mouse and it was so much easier to navigate and manage the UI.
I also got the RF remote Mele make for it the F10 which combines both mouse and keyboard and it's actually a pretty nice piece of kit. Well built, it's like a larger Boxee remote with more buttons and a bigger keyboard. It uses a rechargeable battery and is charged via USB cable. You can also turn on and off the air mouse from the remote. The F10 mouse is much more sensitive though thankfully you can tweak this in the settings.
Which to go for I don't know, I never liked wand/air mice so perhaps I'm not the best judge, I prefer using the MS 6000 mouse and you can always fall back to the remote for video playing/controls too.
Hardware:
Not much to say here all the specs are there to see, it's small and fanless with wireless built in, one of the few (only ?) players with a VGA output too, there is also a 2.5” SATA dock on the top of the player under a removable panel. These players are also
unbrickable you can't kill it firmware wise.
Android:
This player is intended for the Chinese market so that's another thing to consider out of the box the language is set to Chinese which is easy enough to change (just go into settings and keep clicking the top most menu item and you'll get to language) and there are a bunch of Chinese apps included which you can remove.
The 1.6 firmware make it quicker/easier to change language and remove these pre-installed apps.
Android 2.3.4 ships on it and it certainly feels like a more tailored version of Android then the one that runs on Amlogic Android TV boxes, its closest competition. Everything scales well enough up to 1080p for the most part, you can even select 1080@24Hz as an output option.
For those unfamiliar with Android a lot of apps expect wireless and won't work with Ethernet and some will refuse to install via the market even. However Mele have worked some magic and certain apps which refused to work over Ethernet now do work with Ethernet active so that's a nice touch. However I did notice some apps would refuse to install via the market when using Ethernet so there are still some issues to be resolved with that.
Another to watch out for is that the internal flash memory of the player is mounted as an SDcard, this is done as most things under Android expect to install to an SDcard however this can be confusing as when you plug in an actual SDcard your wondering where it is to access the data. Using ES File Explorer (enable root browsing in settings) you can find the contents under mnt/extern_sd0 this goes for the USB and SATA inputs too you'll see them in this area. Note that you can install apk files using ES File Explorer so it's very handy that way as many of the other apk installer's just auto scan sdcard which will get you nothing of course.
You can also read NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT formatted drives, no EXT4 support unfortunately, Android does support EXT4 so don't know why it's omitted.
Finally the Android OS is rooted so you can do other cool things with it.
Android Market:
The older market is present, application selection is filtered so not everything is available. There are
market hacks that should open it up further which I tried and it works so you have the newest market app but I didn't notice a difference in app selection.
Web Browsing:
Works well enough with mouse or F10 remote, I wouldn't use stock remote with it. Flash 10 is present, you can't update to Flash 11 otherwise you will lose hardware acceleration for video which is a problem with many Android set top boxes. HTML5 video works well enough on the sites that support it. Youtube app works very well and videos are in HD.
Media Player:
I'll have to break this down as it might be a little confusing initially.
The video player app with hardware decoding is only reachable through apps that call it which is a thing you can do under Android though not all apps will.
Also included is a 2160p Gallery app it is a photo gallery app. The video app allows selecting audio and subtitle tracks and it is designed for use with the stock remote too. There is also support for 3D SBS style videos within the stock video player, you can set the type of 3D mode so the players UI display properly in 3D.
There is a another app called “File Manager” this provides a basic GUI from which you can browse any attached SDCard, SATA or USB device along with internal storage using the stock remote. The file manager app can use any installed media player app to play media like the built in video app, it can filter between various media types and includes an auto play of the video though I would prefer if you could turn this off. It actually resembles the GUI from Realtek players a bit.
Media support is quite good but there is a major problem, the AC3 & DTS codecs don't work with hardware decoding active but all other audio types are fine like Flac, MP3, Vorbis etc. If you disable the hardware decoding then the AC3/DTS audio plays normally but that's simply not a viable option. The problem is noted on the Chinese Mele forums, their was a patch released but not for the newer firmwares, apparently it is to be fixed in the Android 4 release.
I would strongly recommend getting
MX Player Pro as it is the only player of the third party ones I tested that supported the hardware decoding on the Mele A2000 and also has a nice UI with easier selection of subtitles and audio tracks. You can also use it in conjunction with the File Manager app and many other applications which don't recognise the video app as a media player.
MX Player pro also better detects the proper aspect ratio for videos and it also can do software decoding of audio with the hardware decoder active but this was very buggy in my experience.
Third party SMB/Samba and DLNA apps are very hit and miss, some apps for instance prevented MX Player Pro from using the video hardware decoder.
Getting access to network shares is messy, the easiest way to resolve this is to install
CIFS Manager or
Mount Manager, these apps will mount a SMB network share to a local folder, the settings below are what you use, also you must use an IP address for the name of the server it will not work with anything else.
For example
Server: 192.168.1.28
Mount path: /mnt/sdcard/NAS_share
Linux:
I imagine this is what some or even most people will be buying it for, an
easy to install image has just been released for another All Winner A10 device and it works on the A2000, it's very early days but it does indeed work but certain things are broken like networking support and hardware video decoding, you'll need a 4GB or larger SDcard. In time all of that will be fixed so it could be a nice little platform.
So an interesting little gizmo,the Android software could be more polished & really these Android TV boxes need a proper shell/launcher with support for network shares or even DLNA it can't be that hard to copy a WDTV Live style UI.
I'm guessing an optimized linux OS running XBMC will allow the A10 chipset to really stretch its legs but we will have to wait for that. Perhaps not too long given the
chatter in the thread on the XBMC forums, the hardware decoders on the A10 chipset are working now with XBMC apparently.
Other Stuff:
Sopcast crashed the box (auto reboots) the first time I tried to install the apk but worked the second time, it appeared to run normally from there.
Plex works even over Ethernet and everything seemed to be okay though the UI on Plex for Android 2.3 is a bit cramped.
Netflix installed and ran though I don't have a subscription to it so didn't test, I was under the impression Netflix would not install on rooted devices but it did on this.
1.6 firmware, it took an hour or so to download this from Mele's site so you'll want to use a download manager too otherwise it will loose the link.
To update the firmware manually.
• Use the Phoenix utility (run as admin) and select the img file and burn to an SDcard, the card must be 4GB or larger anything smaller will not work. The Phoenix tool used is also in the rar.
• Unplug the power from the Mele A1000/A2000 and insert SDcard then plug in power.
• Lights will flash blue/red on the front of the box.
• After two-three minutes the lights should go off on the front at which point the update is installed so you can remove the SDcard and pull the power, then just start it up normally again.
Mele forum, in Chinese but Chrome does a reasonable enough job at translating.
Power Consumption: Cnxsoft posted these
numbers in his review on the comments section. His review was a lot of help in figuring out things.
u-boot idle, 0.23A@5V = 1.15W
Android idle. 0.34A@5V = 1.7W
Android busy navigating some web page: 0.55A@5V = 2.75W
Android 2.3.3 + youtube + video 720p = ~4.6W
Android 2.3.3 + SATA HDD + video 1280p = ~7.3W
Ubuntu 12.04 (headless) + SATA HDD + deluge (torrent client) + minidlna (dlna server) = ~5.0W-6.5W (sometimes max 7.8W)
I'd bookmark CNXSoft's website as thats were all the cool stuff relating to All Winner A10 seems to be covered.