hey, shane here with that’s it guys. skystream was kind enough to send us out acouple of android tv boxes for us to review. today we’ll be taking a look at their skystreamx5 cable tv replacement box. skystream has several devices on their websiteincluding the x5, the x4, as well as their cable-cutting packages which come with anantenna.
Android TV box with kodi, now, when you open the box, the first thingyou see is the ‘quick start guide’, which shows you how to get the box hooked up andconnected to your internet. this is the actual box here. underneath the box are the accessories:
the air mouse remote and usb dongle. the micro usb charging cable for the remote. an hdmi cable. a coax to belling lee adapter, for those ineurope. composite and rca video cables. the full user manual. and, of course, the ac adapter. the skystream x5 has some solid specs, includinga 2ghz amlogic s812 quad-core processor an 8-core arm mali-450 gpu
2gb of ram and 16gb of on-board storage, for apps andlocal recordings. you can expand the storage using an sd cardthrough the external slot and you can also use a usb flash drive orexternal hard drive with one of the four usb 2.0 ports. for the internet connections, it featureswifi and lan options. including a dual-band wireless ac adapterwith an external antenna. and for those looking to plug it in throughethernet, a 10/100 cat 5 connection. there’s a built-in atsc tuner that you canuse to pick up over the air channels as well
as basic cable and record it using the built-indvr app. for video and audio output, there’s an hdmi1.4 port, which allows it to deliver resolutions up to 4k at 30hz and 1080p and 60. it also supports 1080p 3d signals, which i’lltry and test out later on in the review. it is hdcp compliant, which is a requirementfor netflix, and has full dolby digital and dts output for surround sound. there’s also an analog video and audio outputthrough composite video and rca audio connectors. now that i’ve gone over all the specs, let'sgo ahead and get this thing hooked up. when you first power on the unit, you areprompted to pick the language, adjust the
overscan, which by default is underscanningto 91%, and connect to the internet either over wifi or an ethernet connection. once all that is set up, there are additionalsettings that you can configure on the settings tile. you can also get into the stock android settingsscreen, which is where i’ll be adjusting the time from a 24-hour to 12-hours. now that i’ve configured everything i want,let's go over the interface. the home screen contains categorized applications: video apps, favorite apps, music apps, localapps, and all apps.
on the bottom are pinnable applications, whichyou can switch out by selecting the plus sign and picking apps that you want displayed. on the application bar is kodi, which youwill be using the majority of the time, showbox, which has pretty much every tv showand movie available. the tv tuner & dvr app, mobdro, which livebroadcasts all kinds of tv shows and movies on rotation the updating app a speedtest.net app the google play store
a teamviewer quick support app, in case yourun into any issues and want skystream to help you out and finally the web browser. as i said before, you can change all theseout. i personally put netflix and plex on the hotbarand removed theteamviewer & updating app. now the biggest selling point of the skystreamx5 is the pre-loaded software and plugins, as i mentioned above showbox is a great appfor tv shows and movies. however, kodi is really the main attractionhere. skystream curates a ton of pre-loaded kodiplugins for the device and updates the apps
on a regular basis to remove dead and deprecatedservices. if you’ve ever used kodi, you’ve probablyseen a service that no longer works anymore. they remove old plugins when you run the updatingtool on kodi. if you are unfamiliar with kodi, you’regoing to hear terms such as “plugins†and “repositoriesâ€. a plugin is an application that has content. a repository is a collection of plugins thatyou can download. i’ll run you through some of the pluginsi’ve been using on here. my personal favorite so far has actually beenvelocity.
they have tons of the latest tv shows andmovies and give you the option to favorite what you’re interested so you can quicklywatch them from the home screen. i messed around with some of the live tv applicationsand found that ccloudtv works exceptionally well for watching live broadcasts such asthe news and even a nascar race. for sports other than racing, you can usesportsdevil, which live streams the nfl, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, and even ufcand wrestling. and these are just a samples of the pluginsthat are already loaded on here. with all the repositories on the x5, thereare literally hundreds of plugins available. playback of local and network video worksas expected.
it also works with ntfs formatted usb harddrives, which is great. i was able to test out 3d content on the boxand was able to get side-by-side and top and bottom 3d video to work. there isn’t a fully functioning iso playerthat handles ripped 3d blu-ray movies, so the videos i loaded on here were downloadsfrom the internet. kodi automatically recognized the top andbottom 3d film and doubled the interface, which was pretty cool. the side-by-side video, however, wasn’tautomatically recognized, but this was a video loaded from youtube.
for both videos, i had to manually selectthe appropriate 3d mode on my projector, so i wasn’t able to get the device to output“frame packed†3d. after using the x5 over the past few weeks,i want to go over some things to consider when picking one of these up. the first thing goes for basically every smarttv box. do yourself a huge favor and pick up one ofthe logitech touchpad keyboards. i reviewed the k400r here and have bought3 of them since doing that review. they go for under $30 and they are a necessityfor one of these. i want to go over some of the pros and consfor the device.
huge positives: this device is pre-loaded with tons of kodiplugins & applications, and this is where you're going to get most of your content from. the interface is super easy to use and there'sa big customer support backing. they have a lot of remote operation and updateassistance available. so they can walk you through how to updateyour device, and how to get the plugins working, stuff like that. the device has a hardware reset button, whichis huge if you really screw up badly. and some of the key specs that really drivethe device:
an external wifi antenna is huge, becauseif you're in an area or in a portion of your house that doesn't really have good wifi signal,the wifi antenna can make a bit of difference. but it's also nice because you can actuallyadd an external antenna if you want, so you can an additional extended antenna. 4-usb 2.0 ports, so this means you can addyour wireless touchpad keyboard, the actual remote that it comes with, which takes upa usb port. you can have an external hard drive and ausb flash drive running all at once. it has a full-sized sd card slot, which isgreat because i still have some old sd cards laying around, but it's also nice becauseeven if you have a microsd card, you can just
pop it into an adapter and put it in there. the atsc tv tuner with dvr. i didn't really use it, but having that functionalityis great if you have an older television that doesn't have the newer digital tuner, thisthing will pick it up. plus it has the dvr function, so you can recordyour programs. it has full cec support, so if your tv hasthis function, which most do, it basically lets you control your television with thisbox, all with one remote. it also supports the automatic input selecting,so when you turn this thing on, if you're on something else, it will automatically switchthe input over to the device.
now some of the negatives with the device: it is not stupid proof, so you're going tohave to do some tinkering to get it configured. you can just plug this thing in and it works. you're going to have to do a bit of work. the air mouse is wonky. as you'll see in the video here, it's notreally calibrated and it gets lost on screen regularly. i found myself using the motion activationon and off button several times trying to get it centered and ultimately ended up justusing my logitech touchpad keyboard.
it's just easier to use that. the lan connection is not automatically enabledwhen it's connected. what this means is when you plug in - let'ssay you go from wifi to ethernet - when you plug in your ethernet cable, it's not automaticallygoing to switch over to the internet connection. so, you’ll have to go into the settingsto turn it on. also within the settings; underscan by defaultis kind of dumb. what it basically does is - you're going tohave a smaller screen to start off with and you have to basically turn up the underscan. so it starts off at 91% and you want to pushit up to 100%.
not something that you may experience, buti was going from device to device and had to configure this each time, so it's a littlebit of an annoyance and it's something that the other device that they sent us - the (element)ti5 - didn't do. finally, there's no real surround sound output. the device has the hardware necessary foroutputting surround sound, but there's really no software on this device that actually hassurround sound output. i look for a couple of things when i lookat smart tv boxes like this: i want lot of functionality, smooth videoplayback, and surround sound support over hdmi.
the only way to get surround sound outputto work is to manually configure it configure it throughkodi. i have a tutorial video on how to do this,but it is quite a bit of work to actually get it enabled. you're average consumer is not going to beable to do this without watching a tutorial video like this. most people aren’t actually using surroundsound, but if this is a concern for you, understand that you will have to configure it to getit to work. overall, i was actually very impressed withthe full package they have here.
there is enough content that is easily accessibleto someone who isn’t tech savvy, and plenty more content for those wanting to put theeffort in. if you use plex and want a device to streamyour plex library, the kodi plugin is exceptionally good and actually has surround sound outputonce you configure it. if you guys are interested in this device,i will have an affiliate link below to purchase the skystream x5. using this link helps us out and keeps ourservers running.
i'll have all of the videos mentioned in thisvideo linked below, so click that “expand this†button.
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