[General Questions and Answers] 2VULGAR:
My new G Box Midnight.

Alright, I got my G Box Midnight in the mail yesterday. It came loaded with the newest version of firmware that is on the androidtvbox.us web site. Just in case, I downloaded the latest ROOTED verson and followed the steps to load that version on it. (I like to start from scratch anyways) Once that was loaded and rebooted, the first thing I did was reinstall XBMC for android RC2 (latest revision) then connected it to my network via the wifi. I loaded a couple of add ons for XBMC and tested out "icefilms". It was very choppy. and the voice did not sync with the video. I turned on the eth port and re-tested... same results.

I loaded a few movies onto a thumb drive and ran them through XBMC... same performance... very choppy video and the sound was out of sync. Why would this be? It is from a local usb drive. I loaded the movies into the media center that comes preloaded with the box, and the video played rather smooth. not 100% but close to 98%.

I installed setcpu and checked the CPU settings of the stock kernel. It only allows up to 1Ghz max. So I set it to 1Ghz max and 7 hundred something min and set the governer to "performance". It did not make any difference in the performance of XBMC. It is still very choppy no matter what I do to "up the performance" of the box.

I installed HBO Go from the play store and signed into my account. It is a little slugish to get going, and once I selected a movie to stream, the video was ok, (watchable) but the sound was a little off. (not as bad as XBMC though)

Click here to see a short video I took of the HBO Go performance.

So, from what I found, the box works pretty well when playing video files from usb via the media center app that comes with the box, but XBMC still needs a lot of work to stream movies/videos from the web as well as through a usb drive. I hope they work the bugs out of XBMC for Android soon. Like I said in my previous post, I have XBMC (ver 11.0) running on a HTPC (windows 7) in my living room and it works awesome.

All in all, I give this box a 6.5 out of 10. Once they work the bugs out of XBMC it will be a lot better.

[Update]

Upon reading through the XBMC and XDA forums about the G Box Midnight, I ended up downloading the XBMC v.12 Alpha 6 Pivos apk and sideloaded it. Now, there is no issue with playing all media files from USB drive... and the only issue I have had so far with the icefilms add-on is it gives me a script error when trying to open any media file. Other add-ons seem to work almost flawless. Now if they could only combine the 2 versions of XBMC into 1 working version... this little box would be perfect. (XBMC RC2 for Android is very choppy, but the add-ons seem to work... and the Alpha 6 for Pivos works very well, except for the script errors with the add-ons)

If you have the same issue I have with XBMC, and want to try the alpha 6 version... here is the download link: XBMC v.12 Alpha 6 Pivos

[edit] 1/14/2013

gbox just came out with a new rom here for the version 2.1 and 2.2 boxes. (I have the 2.2 version) that new rom mixed with XBMC RC3 and this box is now running at 99% perfect. I'm still getting some script errors with add-ons (icefilms) but I don't think that is the box or XBMC. (a lot of other add-ons work just fine) I would LOVE to see someone build a kernel for this box, maybe just to streamline it a bit and give us a little tweaking of the cpu... but that is for another post. ;)