Best Android or other TV service box

[Dunflittin68]

Is 30 poor for a Ping test which I did a couple of hours ago? I thought that was good

[Paulinmalaga]

The lower the better, but anything under 50 is acceptable. Anything below 30 is very good.

[gerrynag]

I don't profess to be an expert but I assume you have run a speed check when it is buffering. You seldom get the download speed they promise. Then I believe bandwidth comes into it as well and if the provider has too many subscribers, then at peak times it causes problems. It's easy to check download speed, there's lots of sites do it. I use ookla http://www.speedtest.net/ I don't know if a better android box would make much of a difference.

I checked the speed only yesterday and it was running at over 12mps, as you say you rarely get what you are promised. We were watching it on both Mobdro and LiveNet TV and even RedBox but had the same problem with all of them. I am wondering if as you say that overload at popular times is causing the problem as we don't get the problem so much in a morning, only occasionally on sites like Gold, ITV3 and as I say on both Mobdro and LiveNetTV which is what we watch with the most. We have lost a lot of access to channels on LiveNetTV as we can't figure out how to update it on our old Kodi app which is a few yrs old and we are using Confluence interface, so not sure where to look to update it. I think we use Kodi 16. Mobdro seems to update regularly with pop up boxes to use but not LiveNetTV. Any idea how to update it ?

If you want to use latest version of Kodi, (17.6), you will probably have to get a new Kodi box. We had Kodi 16, but found that it didn't work very well and limited number of streams, buffered a lot too. Tried to update to 17.6, but box not didn't have enough memory to run it. So bought a new box with higher spec and installed 17.6 without a problem.

[Dunflittin68]

Think I might do just that, any recommendations going up from a T95 which is what we have?

[gerrynag]

Well I got a MX10 TV BOX, with Android 8.1, Rockchip RK3328 Quad-core 4GB DDR3 RAM 32G ROM from Amazon UK back in Feb for £70. It came pre-loaded with Kodi, plus few other apps. I was specifically looking for one that had as much RAM as possible, to try to reduce the buffering. The MX10 at the time seemed to be the best one on the market, certainly if you wanted to pay less than £100.
The one I actually got is no longer available on Amazon, but just do a search on Amazon for 'MX10 Android', (notice that they have now got ones with 4GB RAM, 64G Rom, so might be worth going for one of them). Make sure it has at least Android 8.1.

[Dunflittin68]

Thanks for the advice, will take a look !

[markwilding]

I thought I would see how much football my Fire TV would allow me to watch this weekend and see if I would get much buffering.
The app I have is called Live net Tv and it worked fine. HD video, in inverted commas, gave me a watchable smooth pictures, higher quality than I get when watching on my PC and no buffering at all.
The match I wanted to watch was Man city v Southampton and found it quite easily even though none of the the UK channels broadcasted it. Pity about the result though.

[gerrynag]

What is your Internet speed?

[markwilding]

My internet is fast so that has never been the reason for the buffering. 350 megas.

[fyfin]

Well as it's for a friend who didn't want to spend too much I came down to a choice of two GTC Android 6.0 4K TV BOX DVB-S2/T2/Cable/ISDBT 2+16G Satellite Receiver or VIGICA C400 Plus DVB T2 S2 Satellite Receiver Android 7.1 Smart TV BOX both similar prices but the Vigica had a higher spec but not such good reviews so I have ordered the GTC from Ebay. I'll let you know what I think when it turns up. In case anyone is interested here are the links https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07 ... _qh_dp_hza and
https://www.ebay.es/itm/Freesat-GTC-And ... 2117926883

[gerrynag]

My internet is fast so that has never been the reason for the buffering. 350 megas.

Crikey, out here in the campo, I am lucky to get much above 5Meg, meant to be 10, but rarely get that.

[El Cid]

You might get lucky. We live in the Campo, Movistar recently said that we would not get fibre for the foreseeable future. A month later they wired up 600mb cables across our garden.

They say we will get the service within a few weeks when the cabling is complete.

Sid

[casita-bonita]

My internet is fast so that has never been the reason for the buffering. 350 megas.

Crikey, out here in the campo, I am lucky to get much above 5Meg, meant to be 10, but rarely get that.

Hmmnnn, maybe you should look for a different supplier. We are in the campo and have a 15 meg connection. Whenever i do a speed test it's around there, never seems to be less than 12meg. Not quite 350 but more than adequate for streaming tv, assuming of course that the stream provider has enough resources.

[firsttango]

You might get lucky. We live in the Campo, Movistar recently said that we would not get fibre for the foreseeable future. A month later they wired up 600mb cables across our garden.

They say we will get the service within a few weeks when the cabling is complete.

Sid

Good news Sid, you'll certainly see a difference especially when streaming 4K UHD programmes and uploading large files to cloud etc. Enjoy

[Wicksey]

My internet is fast so that has never been the reason for the buffering. 350 megas.

Crikey, out here in the campo, I am lucky to get much above 5Meg, meant to be 10, but rarely get that.

Hmmnnn, maybe you should look for a different supplier. We are in the campo and have a 15 meg connection. Whenever i do a speed test it's around there, never seems to be less than 12meg. Not quite 350 but more than adequate for streaming tv, assuming of course that the stream provider has enough resources.

There's obviously different degrees of campo as although we are not far from the coast and main roads, we can only get a signal from one supplier and we are lucky to get 5mbps. Some areas of campo do have old telephone lines but there's nothing like that close to us. If you rely on Wimax it just depends on the lie of the land and the hills, as we are only just out of view of another supplier's mast but cannot put an aerial anywhere on our land that would access its signal unfortunately.

[casita-bonita]

We're 3 km north of Sayalonga, near the main road, but campo all the same. There are no landline telephones near us, although ironically one of the string of telegraph poles that provides phone system to Competa is in our drive. As for fibre I would love it but not in a hundred years will fibre be laid where it's accessible to us. So we are Wimax, for which we do have a choice of a couple of suppliers. As mentioned earlier we do get a solid 12Meg, normally it's closer to the 15Meg that we're supposed to have.

In reality you should only need a couple of Megs to get decent SD tv streams.Ping and Jitter can play a big part in how successful this is for you. As does the quality of the streams being provided. For example tvplayer, iplayer, itvplayer all work very well for me. But if I try tvTap or Mobdro I often get buffering. Even the one I have been paying for for the last year seems to have gone bad so won't be giving them any more of my money.

I have been playing with transponder.tv and Hoola recently and yesterday I bought 1 month of full access from the former. Watched various UK terrestrial channels all evening and not one incidence of buffering throughout. Right now the main drawback with Transponder is that they don't have an app available yet so it has to be watched with a browser. Still goes full screen for viewing though. There seems to be some oddities with my android box and I can't get a browser (and I've tried at least a dozen different ones) to render and respond to clicks properly. Works fine on my tablet and PC just not my tvbox. But I've found workarounds so can live with that for the time being. So far so good viewing wise.