Thank you, you saved me some work tonight!
Hello everybody,
I donāt use CoreELEC yet, but since last year I started looking at the system due to my interest in EmuELEC.
So after following this topic I decided to buy a Vontar HK1 RBOX tv box and installed the nightly version 19.5 on it, with 4GB dtb, and it worked.
And on 07/08/2022 the trial version of EmuELEC (4;6) was released. I installed it, using the same dtb (which was not included in the device tree folder of that version) and it also worked perfectly.
I thank the CoreELEC and EmuELEC teams and everyone here who made this possible.
Thanks all for the helpful support. My bluetooth remote (UR-01) works fantastic now 
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Wellcome onboard. The owner of this thread has been reporting COREELEC
Hi
I am looking to buy a device with S905X4 to use with Coreelec. It seems the main issue is that some devices have a yet not working gigabit chipsets. I would like to avoid it, as my setup uses Ethernet.
I would appreciate if @clarkss12 you could post where you bough yours as your gigabit Ethernet is working. Also, I would also appreciate if @emveepee , @siri25920 , @Kill_Bill , @kostas912 and @bululu you guys could share were you bought yours, as your gigabit Ethernet is not working.
Seems to me the new purchases all have the new gigabit, not yet working, chipsets, but it is worth a try.
Thanks
With S905X4 we support the Ugoos (AM7 and X4) and the Buzztv X5.
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Mine was Amazon, seller Susay. I suspect that they are purchased in batches and the batch rather then the dealer will be what matters.
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All those models are way over 100usd, compared to less than half the price for other brands. Apart from reputation and less probability of being scammed with a fake chipsets, are there any technical differences?
Also, I understand the benefits of more RAM, but I am ignorant about the advantages or tradeoffs of the amount of ROM. What is the deal with 32 vs 64 vs 128 GB models?
Yes, absolutely. Still worth trying to catch one from a 1 Gigabit working batch. I understand there are no guarantees, just trying to increase the odds of getting lucky.
I have a HK1 BOX 4G+128G (S905X3) and a HK1 RBOX X4 4G+32G (S905X4) so Iām not sure if this is the problem only on X4 or on all similar 32G devices:
On the box that comes with 32G eMMC, SDXC (>32G, <=2T) cards canāt be recognised, and Android/CoreELEC kernel will flood the kmesg with corrupted SD controller infos, Iāve tested this with 4 different Netac 64G cards, 1 Samsung 128G card and 1 Samsung 256G card and all result in the same error. And since these cards canāt be recognised by the kernel (u-boot still can), you canāt boot CoreELEC on a 32G model with a SDXC card. But this is not a big problem if you only use a SDHC card as boot drive and wonāt store much data on it.
On the box that comes with 128G eMMC though, thereās no problem using SDXC cards, all of the previously mentioned SDXC cards work on it, both in u-boot and in Android/CoreELEC, kernel is happy with all of them.
My guess is they cheap out the MMC controller on all 32G models, and the controller can only work with SDHC cards (2G-32G) as a result
On my 64GB version I added an 128GB card which CoreElec runs.
Please remind buying ācheap devicesā may result in some not working features and maybe the will not be working ever. Like there is already a s905x4 box with not supported eth chip so gbit lan is not usable. Donāt remember which one.
A lot of users wasted money and time in past on such cheap boxesā¦ Just search the forum about the Xā¦ devices.
True, I personally wanted a Shield kinda old, and UGOOS is a brand I respect for supporting their products but was close to the shieldās price. I wanted a decent box with AV1 support, took a chance and went with the HK1 X4. The Tanix X4 is another box I tested (on android) and liked.
In China here you can get a Ugoos X4 directly from the manufacturer (since Ugoos is a China company, and most of CEās partners also are) with 370 CNY + 13 CNY shipping, thatās only ~56.62USD. Never thought the product will get that much more expensive after exportingā¦
For me, I buy these cheap boxes for tinkering and development so I can worry less after burning the device (one for only ~200CNY, thatās ~29.6USD), but not for actual usage. I got other more expensive and robust devices for my acutal media and entertaining usage and I would not recommend buying these cheap boxes for your main CE/EE device.
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I am planning on picking up one of these boxes with the new Amlogic SoC (# VONTAR X98mini Amlogic S905W2 TV Box Android 11 4G 64GB X98 mini Support AV1). Of course, the boxes with the S905W2 are budget SoCs and do NOT support gigabit Ethernet. I think CoreELEC devs are working on this SoC.
Years ago, I tried to find an inexpensive media player that will do it all, guess there is no such animal, but I keep looking. The fun is in the chase. These inexpensive Android boxes running CoreELEC (used to be LibreELEC and OpenELEC), come pretty close to being an all in one media player.
Using Tvheadend server, these devices are a DVR recorder AND player, all in one device, which is accessible anywhere on the local network.
Also, it is amazing that these devices support Netflix in 1080p with DD+ audio (obviously a Netflix subscription is required), and automatic resolution and framerate switching.
Of course these players are my hobby, so I have a lot of them that I have purchased in the last 10 years.
However, if the device you purchase will be your MAIN media player, then, yes, it is better to go with a device that is supported by the CE team. I do think most of the people on this forum are tinkers like me and like messing with new tech. If we destroy a $40 or $50 item, it is much better than destroying a $170 USD device.
To be noted, out of the dozens of boxes that I have tinkered with, in the last 10 years, I have only ābrickedā one device that I could NOT recover. About 10 years ago, the Beelink engineers gave some users from Freaktab a box that we helped debug. To swap firmwareās, you had to open the box and short out two pins, they were tiny. Those were the good ole days.
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S905W2 is S4? so not yet available on CE-19 or CE-20. Only with new (not yet public) 5.4 kernel.
Do CE work onthe tanix x4 ?
Sorry I donāt have a Tanix anymore, and it was only tested on Android.
@josemarprete Thank you for letting us know.
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I have some good news for all CE users that has a box with JL2101 phy: Iāve ported the JL2101 PHY driver to CEās kernel, and it works perfectly fine!
CoreELEC:~ # find /usr/lib/modules/4.9.269 -name jl*
/usr/lib/modules/4.9.269/kernel/drivers/net/phy/jl2xx1.ko
CoreELEC:~ # ip a
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue qlen 1
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
inet6 ::1/128 scope host
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP8000> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel qlen 1000
link/ether 00:e5:00:00:18:c1 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 192.168.7.145/24 brd 192.168.7.255 scope global eth0
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP8000> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel qlen 1000
link/ether d0:22:be:ea:1a:f1 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet6 fe80::d222:beff:feea:1af1/64 scope link
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
Backstory: Even I was lucky to get a non-JL2101 HK1 RBOX X4, I was still hit by it as I bought another S905X3 HK1 BOX for tinkering and without any surprise it came with the notorious JL2101.
The driver is not directly available on JLsemiās website but I managed to find it in the format of patches in embedfireās LubanCatWrt (an OpenWrt fork) repo for their DoorNet2 for the Rockchip 5.4 kernel they are using. The driver was ported to some other OpenWrt forks as well. After porting the driver and backporting some macros from newer kernels and the driver successfully builds and loads and works with high load for several hours.
Iāll clean up the code a little bit and opened a PR tomorrow to merge this driver into CEās kernel : )
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