Looking for a small, low-power box that you can use both as a media center PC for playing videos on your TV and as a media hub for backing and sharing your smartphone’s photos and videos?

The folks behind Ezeecube have designed a device that does both of those things. It’s a media hub with up to 1TB of storage. It can backup media from your Android or iOS device. And it runs an embedded Linux operating system with XBMC media center software for displaying your content on a TV.

It’s also a modular device which makes it easy to add more storage or other features. There’s just one catch: you can’t actually buy an EzeeCube yet. But you can help fund its creation by backing the team’s crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo.

ezeecube_00

The Ezeecube is basically a small PC with a Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of eMMC storage, and a 1TB 2.5 inch hard drive.

It also has an SDXC card slot, HDMI, S/PDIF, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, and Gigabit Ethernet as well as a USB 2.0 port and micro USB OTG port. The base unit measures 3.9″ x 3.9″ x 0.9″ and weighs less than 10 ounces.

While the large hard drive and custom software helps set this box apart from other ARM-based media centers, another unusual feature is the EzeeStack connector on top of the system. You can simply place an expansion module on top of the case… and another module on top of that one if you’d like.

One module is the EzeeDisk stackable hard drives. Each disk adds an extra 2GB of storage to your system and you can add up to 4 units for a total of 9TB of storage.

There’s also an EzeePlay Blu-ray drive. Just stack it on top of the system and you can watch DVDs or Blu-ray videos on the system.

Eventually the team hopes to sell the EzeeCube for $299, but early backers of the crowdfunding campaign can reserve one for pledges of $179 to $249 — although if you’re outside of Hong Kong you’ll have to pay extra for shipping and the first devices aren’t expected to go out until October, 2014.

The campaign will only be funded if the EzeeCube team raises $75,000 or more by July 4th.

thanks Harley!

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13 replies on “EzeeCube is a small, modular media center and media hub (crowdfunding)”

  1. Couple questions hopefully someone from the project can answer:

    If I have an EzeeCube connected to my AVR via HDMI, and network via Ethernet, will it automatically pull down new audio and video files as I add them to iTunes on a Mac in a different room? (Primarily ALAC audio files, with some video files.) Does it actually copy the files to the EzeeCube (essentially acting as a backup), or does it just access the files stored on the Mac?

    Also, does it play bit-perfect audio up to 24/196 without any re-sampling?

    Thanks.

  2. keeping you guys posted, we now support PVR (personal video recorder) functionality to watch and record live Television by simply stacking our TV Tuner accessory

  3. Way too pricey and old specs.
    You can already get for 60$ a dualcore amlogic box which works flawless with xmbc on it.
    By the time it will be shipped we will be probably talking about 4k or H265, so I really don’t see the point of another box like that.

    1. Stephan Rafin has done major work in porting XBMC to iMX platform and has worked with almost all iMX boards supporting XBMC (https://stephan-rafin.net/blog/2014/06/05/ezeecube-an-exciting-mediacenter-and-photo-organizer/)
      The specs are very carefully chosen and EzeeCube is specially designed for XBMC while other boards are very generic and end up about the same cost once XBMC setup is complete (board+SD card+power supply+HDD) and wrapped in aesthetically unpleasing boxes

      Not many boxes offer features supported by EzeeCube such as
      – Preinstalled and pre-configured XBMC
      – Full 1080p XBMC GUI rendering
      – Sync content from iOS/Android devices
      – No port-forwarding configuration required
      – UPnP playback on all iOS/Android devices (EzeeSync app)
      – CEC support
      – Audio passthrough
      – Hardware video decoding
      – Hardware de-interlacing
      – Pre-configured PVR (testing in progress)
      – Easy to stack accessories

      EzeeCube run open source XBMC platform and we would keep our development of XBMC open source and continue to support future formats

    1. It supports very easy stackable way of extending the storage capacity by simply placing the stackable EzeeDrive on top of EzeeCube, no wires required and its ability to have smooth, easy to schedule backup via USB makes its simple to use for everyone

  4. Glad you really like the modular thingy. We also waited a long time for someone to build it. Finally we decided to build ourselves.

    3.5″ is a really great idea and we did look into it. However that increase the power consumption and the heat generated. Hence we went for 2.5″ drive, 5400rpm to reduce the cost and heat generated.

    We are offering a developer kit for accessories so that hardware engineers can build their own stack-ons. Hope someone will build a 3.5″ stack-on with a fan.

    EzeeCube Team

    1. Is there any reason why you went with this SOC? Why not the new Amlogic m802?

  5. Too bad the drives are 2.5 inch, otherwise i’ve been wanting for years for such a modular thingy. With 2.5 inch they negate the benefits since price per TB kinda doubles.
    Ideally the box would have a better SoC and fast enough NAND storage and the modules would add HDDs.Would provide more flexibility and better cost for the user,especially when upgrading to a faster/newer base module.

    1. If you don’t care about space/looks, just get a 3-4 TB external HDD and just use the USB port.

  6. I think the best part is that it can run the Linux operating system.

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