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The GeekBox is an interesting dual-boot TV box that doubles up as a dev board

Yash GargNovember 25, 2015

There’s already an active community of TV box hackers committed to bringing a desktop-like experience to these inexpensive boxes. What would be better would be a TV box that is made for the devs in mind — and the GeekBox is exactly that.

The GeekBox is an open source TV box powered by the 64-bit octa-core RK3368 chipset (H.265 compatible) from Rockchip. It also has 2GB of RAM and 16GB on-board storage with that based on eMMC 5.0, which should be fast enough for most users.

Another interesting, dev-centric feature of the device is its MXM3 interface, which will allow you to turn the GeekBox into a development board. Pretty neat indeed!

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Other features of the device include 4K x 2K UHD video playback, IR sensor, Bluetooth and WiFi. The TV box also has two full USB ports, one microUSB port, an HDMI output port, an RJ45 Ethernet port and a microSD card slot.

KODI is supported out of the box, while the TV box itself can boot into either Android or Ubuntu. However, with sources made available to anyone, you can expect more OS’s being developed for the GeekBox. It is priced $109.99 and available via Geekbuying.

More information can be found at the official website for the project, which is GeekBox.tv.

Disclaimer: We may be compensated by some of the companies whose products we talk about, but our articles and reviews are always our honest opinions. For more details, you can check out our editorial guidelines and learn about how we use affiliate links.

About the author

Yash Garg
Yash is a blogger by profession, builder of things by passion and foodie by birth. You'll usually find him talking about technology, music, travel and the game of cricket on the streets of Pune when not busy writing or speeding his way through the country! Read more on retro handheld gaming on RETRO91
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Great idea but CPU is under-powered.

Lazar Prodanovic
November 25, 2015
It’s cheap, lo quality with not so good SoC product & pricing is also not so good.
There is a variety of TV boxes to choose with better build quality & old much stronger RK3288 SoC wile similar pricing.
The part about developing is a poor commercial as their are similar development boards that cost half the price besides no one wants to develop for the bord that come with PowerVR GPU’s as they are really not open source friendly in any way.
For comparation purposes the RK3288 is around 50% faster in CPU (4x A17 @ 1.8GHz vs two clusters of A53 wile faster one runs @ 1.8GHz) & 2x in GPU (MALI T764 against single cluster PowerVR SGX 6110) power wile the multimedia abilities (DSP) are on pair along with support for it. Their is also a (usable) Ubuntu Linux build for the RK3288 so it’s practically the same.
- Dis
  November 25, 2015
  At £60/$100? You can get Z3735F Atom boxes for this price but they don’t run Ubuntu (though perhaps they could) but for something stronger like NVidia K1 or Snapdragon 810 you have to pay a lot more.
  - Lazar Prodanovic
    November 25, 2015
    Lol. Z3735F SoC comes with IGP weak one but never the less compatible with general drivers. This basically means that it can run any newer Linux distribution along with Windows. But their is a catch or two. Even generally CPU performance is around the same compared to one of the RK3288 SoC (Intel will win if the SIMD optimization are widely used) the GPU on Z3735F is much weaker. The main difference is in MMC capabilities as Rk3288 is much better in this (thanks to programmable DSP used against the GPU with fixed logic). You must agree that this is most important aspect for one TV box.
    At the end in the this price segment the RK3288 is still best choice. Thing change a little if you put in consideration & Nvidias new game console (mainly for gaming) but it costs around 2x more.
    - Dis
      November 26, 2015
      - Lazar Prodanovic
        November 26, 2015
- riggestin
  November 25, 2015
  - Lazar Prodanovic
    November 26, 2015
    Try with this one:
    http://m.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_141997.html?wid=1
    Sorry for the commercial link!
    This one is let’s say very good build quality (along with good WiFi antenna & cetera), have active cooling, comes with live software updates & suport.
    There is a Android 4.4 & Ubuntu 14.10 on it. Their is also late official beta of Light biz OS (Android 5.1 based) that is a rare thing for RK3288 based ones.
    In this (almost basic) configuration it can handle a little bit of productivity & Android based gaming along with usual stuff you would expect from Set top TV box. If you are for up for more a PC like productivity with Ubuntu or in for lot of Android games along with longevity of use I advise you to go for the same model with more RAM and storage space. The base configuration with 4GB of RAM that comes with 32GB of storage (as storage is optional – their is & 64GB option). That will cost you 146$. It really depends on your needs along with budget. Do try to find a better deal as I don’t have much time to search for it. This is by far not the cheapest solution but it’s one that I am certain you will be satisfied with & there for I can recommend it (that I don’t do easily).

rimakus
November 25, 2015
Great idea but CPU is under-powered.
Lazar Prodanovic
November 25, 2015
It’s cheap, lo quality with not so good SoC product & pricing is also not so good.
There is a variety of TV boxes to choose with better build quality & old much stronger RK3288 SoC wile similar pricing.
The part about developing is a poor commercial as their are similar development boards that cost half the price besides no one wants to develop for the bord that come with PowerVR GPU’s as they are really not open source friendly in any way.
For comparation purposes the RK3288 is around 50% faster in CPU (4x A17 @ 1.8GHz vs two clusters of A53 wile faster one runs @ 1.5GHz) & 2x in GPU (MALI T764 against single cluster PowerVR SGX 6110) power wile the multimedia abilities (DSP) are on pair along with support for it. Their is also a (usable) Ubuntu Linux build for the RK3288 so it’s practically the same.
- Dis
  November 25, 2015
  At £60/$100? You can get Z3735F Atom boxes for this price but they don’t run Ubuntu (though perhaps they could) but for something stronger like NVidia K1 or Snapdragon 810 you have to pay a lot more.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  November 25, 2015
  Lol. Z3735F SoC comes with IGP weak one but never the less compatible with general drivers. This basically means that it can run any newer Linux distribution along with Windows. But their is a catch or two. Even generally CPU performance is around the same compared to one of the RK3288 SoC (Intel will win if the SIMD optimization are widely used) the GPU on Z3735F is much weaker. The main difference is in MMC capabilities as Rk3288 is much better in this (thanks to programmable DSP used against the GPU with fixed logic). You must agree that this is most important aspect for one TV box.
  At the end in the this price segment the RK3288 is still best choice. Thing change a little if you put in consideration & Nvidias new game console (mainly for gaming) but it costs around 2x more.
- Guest
  November 26, 2015
  can you suggest some good priced tv boxes?? thanks
- Dis
  November 26, 2015
  I’m not massively into TV boxes – what is the MMC for?
- Lazar Prodanovic
  November 26, 2015
  Try with this one:
  http://m.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_141997.html?wid=1
  Sorry for the commercial link!
  This one is let’s say very good build quality (along with good WiFi antenna & cetera), have active cooling, comes with live software updates & suport.
  There is a Android 4.4 & Ubuntu 14.10 on it. Their is also late official beta of Light biz OS (Android 5.1 based) that is a rare thing for RK3288 based ones.
  In this (almost basic) configuration it can handle a little bit of productivity & Android based gaming along with usual stuff you would expect from Set top TV box. If you are up for more a PC like productivity with Ubuntu or in for lot of Android games (including multitab Web surfing or long Facebook sessions including videos) along with longevity of use I advise you to go for the same model with more RAM and storage space. The base configuration with 4GB of RAM that comes with 32GB of storage (as storage is optional – their is & 64GB option). That will cost you 146$. It really depends on your needs along with budget. Do try to find a better deal as I don’t have much time to search for it. This is by far not the cheapest solution but it’s one that I am certain you will be satisfied with & there for I can recommend it (that I don’t do easily).
  Best regards.