Xiaomi unveils Android TV media player with 4k and hdr support

The Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi has announced a new media player with Android TV. The Mi Box is able to play 4k video with a maximum frame rate of 60fps and has support for HDR content. The player should be available for purchase in the United States soon.

The media player’s existence was revealed during an Android TV session at Google’s I/O developer conference. When the Mi Box should come out and where it will all be for sale, is not completely known at the moment; the only thing that Xiaomi is letting go of is that at least it will be available in the US soon. That makes the Mi Box the first Android product that Xiaomi officially sells outside of Asia.

The Mi Box is built around a quad-core Cortex A53-soc that has a Mali 450 GPU, coupled with 2GB ram and 8GB storage memory. The system on a chip also has a modern video decoder on board that can not only handle the popular h264 codec, but also new formats such as h265 video and Google’s VP9 codec. This is possible in a maximum of 4k resolution with a frame rate of 60 fps, with support for processing and displaying HDR video. In the audio field, the Mi Box can handle Dolby Digital Plus and DTS, among other things.

The media box has a single USB 2.0 port, a spdif audio output and a 3.5mm audio jack on the outside. The HDMI port is compatible with the HDMI 2.0a standard and version 2.2 of the HDCP encryption. On a wireless level, the Mi Box can handle WiFi ac and Bluetooth 4.0. Xiaomi supplies the Mi Box with a bluetooth remote control that can be used to record voice commands. In addition, the box is compatible with Xiaomi’s own bluetooth game controller.