Do you have a cheap Android tv box? Does it support EXT4?

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MarkTheMorose
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Do you have a cheap Android tv box? Does it support EXT4?

Post by MarkTheMorose »

I have two (well, three, but someone's borrowing the 3rd one) of the kind of cheap Android 'TV' boxes that you find on eBay and Amazon. They connect to a TV, run a customised version of Android and let you do Android-y things, including media playback.

That's what I got them for, as a replacement for a similar media player gadget called a Cyclone. Plug in a USB stick or hard drive in a USB caddy, and it plays back music and video. However, the Cyclone was getting increasingly out of date, not playing media of higher resolution or encoded with newer codecs, and had a very annoying remote control.

The Android boxes seemed capable of playing back pretty much any video format, but their one stumbling block was that they would only read FAT32 or NTFS-formatted media. I've tried 2 of the 3 I have, but neither reads EXT4-formatted drives.

I'm wondering if it's down to the version of Android that the boxes use; the more recent of the two claims to have version 9, with a 4.9.113 kernel. I have a vague recollection of reading that EXT4 support is in Android version 10 and above.
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timmn1
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Re: Do you have a cheap Android tv box? Does it support EXT4?

Post by timmn1 »

I have two of them, but they both run Android 9, and neither one will read EXT 4 media. I'm thinking of scrapping both of them, supposedly there is a new one that is running Android 11 Go that is relatively inexpensive and if I can find it, I'll share the info with you.
Someday, maybe I'll figure out exactly what the hell I'm doing.
MarkTheMorose
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Re: Do you have a cheap Android tv box? Does it support EXT4?

Post by MarkTheMorose »

Thanks, I appreciate you checking. The boxes are cheap enough, but the sellers of these things have a habit of 'exaggerating', shall we say, the specs... I don't want to end up with another one that can't do what I want because it isn't really running Android 10 or above.

On a side note, some of these boxes can be flashed to run Retroarch (or similar), and be used as a retro gaming box, though I've found setting it up a bit too fiddly.
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