There’s no shortage of sticks you can plug into the HDMI port of your TV to stream internet video, play games, or run Android or Windows apps on a big screen. But the Guleek A8 is one of the first I’ve seen to feature an Amlogic S905 processor and HDMI 2.0 support — which means that, at least in theory, it should support 4K video.
Whether it actually manages to do that in practice remains to be seen.
The Guleek A8 is available from AliExpress for $75 plus shipping.
Like many devices in this category, the Guleek A8 is tiny: it looks more like an oversized USB flash drive than an undersized PC. You can easily hold the stick in one hand or slide it into a pocket when it’s not in use.
But this model has a few nice touches including an adjustable antenna which may help with WiFi performance, two micro USB ports (one for power), and a full-sized USB port.
Other features include a microSD card slot, a Fn button, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, 2GB of RAM, 8GB of eMMC storage, and Android 5.1 Lollipop software.
The stick is powered by Amlogic’s S905 processor, which is a quad-core, ARM Cortex-A53, 64-bit chip with ARM Mali-450 graphics and support for 4K video decoding at 60 frames in formats including H.265.
It’s probably a good idea to take claims of 4K support with a grain of salt though — some TV boxes that are supposed to be able to handle ultra HD video fail to deliver on that promise.
Guleek isn’t the only company developing S905-based hardware that’s supposed to support 4K video, but as a demo video posted in August by Roofull shows, while the chipset can play 4K files, the video playback isn’t always smooth.
Just keep in mind that this video shows an engineering sample. It’s possible that the hardware and software may have been optimized since the video was recorded.
via AndroidPC.es
I got a Guleek mini pc and it lasted about two months. It will not boot up.
I’m normally not too picky about 802.11ac being absent in lower-cost devices like this, but if I’m buying this thing for watching 4K content, I’m not going to be storing those files locally.
Streaming a 20-40mbps video on 802.11n could be questionable in certain environments.
This is great, but the S905 SOC isn’t supported yet by Kodi for hardware decoding of H264 and H265.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Android_hardware
Once support is confirmed, this will be a great value for people wanting to play H265 video.