Yesterday, this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidTV/comments/9am2ik/mibox_suddenly_unresponsive_to_both_remote/

Everything was fine and seemed stable with 2179. But today I paused I video playing on VLC to take a phone call. When I came back I found the screen black with the Mi, Dolby, HDMI and DTS logos. It looks like this:

https://imgur.com/a/kwAbcQU

And I just stays like that. Apparently forever.

I tried rebooting. I tried unplugging all the devices from the power and then rebooting after 10 minutes. Neither worked. It's connected directly to the TV via an HDMI cable. (Update 1: I have now tried it on a different TV. No change.)

Any ideas? Or should I just throw in the towel and shell out for an Nvidia Shield, which I don't really want to do. I've been happy with my MiBox until the last two days. But if this device is so buggy that I need to wipe and reinstall everything twice in 24 hours -- well, that might be the end.

-- Update 2 --

I was able to get into the Android recovery screen. Tried clearing the cache and looking at the logs. This is what I found:

https://i.imgur.com/T8BA7Ct.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZcgDO3Q.jpg

So I decided to try to reinstall 2179. It was a total failure:

https://i.imgur.com/77O3a6d.jpg

I suspect this piece of junk is probably bricked.

Do you think I have reached the correct conclusion?

-- Update 3 --

I tried another idea below. Didn't work. I got no response on the other MiBox forum. I'm pretty sure this is a hardware failure of some kind.

But I have resolved the problem. I just ordered a Shield. I am completely sold on the Android TV platform. But I want a better, more robust implementation, and I think the Shield will offer me that.

Ever since the Oreo update it's been downhill with my MiBox. First there were just a few annoyances -- mainly audio issues. I was willing to live with them and wait for the updates. But then my MiBox froze, which seemed to be caused by a wifi and bluetooth issue. I updated to the beta build to recover from that. I was hopeful that'd resolve the problems because I really wanted to keep the product. And it did resolve the problems for about 12 hours. But then I think I had a hardware failure, and without being able to read or write to the disk, there's just no recovery. And rather than buy like for like and likely continue with a glitchy experience, I'm just spending the extra money for a Shield.

I hope it works out well.

Anyway, thanks for all your help.