I see these most commonly with the AMLogic S905D chipset. The built in tuner drives up the price a bit so I wonder are the tuners good or is it better to by a basic Android TV box and spend the extra money on a dedicated USB tuner card like what Hauppauge offers?
The only Android TV devices with a built-in tuner are:
- MyGica ATV598Max: it was released in 2018 but it has never been updated to any of the recent Android versions, it has the optional ATSC, DVB-T2 and ISDB-T tuners.
- WeTek Air: It was released in 2018 and it also has support for several built-in tuners that you could swap, it currently seems to be discontinued.
- Channelmaster Stream Plus: Aimed at the U.S. market, it has a dual ATSC tuner built-in but it had the same fate as the ATV598Max.
- Mecool KT1: It's the latest Android TV device with a DVB-T2/S2/C tuner built-in, the S905X4 SoC and Android 10, it was released just a few weeks earlier.
For the rest of Android TV devices you can use either an HDHomerun network tuner or the FTA Tuner Loader app along with some MyGica USB tuners. A windows/mac/linux server can also be used with nearly every USB tuner, popular servers are NextPVR, TVHeadend, among others.
Aren't those China boxes with tuners for their market? Didn't think those tuners were compatible in the US.
And why not just get the hdhomerun?
I bought a MicroUSB ATSC tuner for my phone once. Using it when mobile (on a bus) was pointless, too many dropped frames, it gets VERY warm and eats up your battery. It for those reasons why you never saw ATSC built into mobile devices. I assume that any Android TV device with a MicroUSB should work, but HDHomerun tuners work better.