Peripheral and smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has been in the press a great deal of late, thanks to aggressive product launches and prominent competitive gains against companies like Samsung. Now, it’s taking on low-cost streaming devices as well, from the likes of Roku and Google’s Chromecast, with the Xiaomi Mi Box Mini.

The new, tiny chassis is a quarter the size of the Mi Box it replaces, but packs a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU instead of the dual-core Cortex-A9 of its predecessor. The chip is clocked more slowly (1.3GHz vs 1.5GHz) and the Cortex-A7 isn’t as powerful as the Cortex-A9, but the Mi Box Mini has one claimed capability that the Mi Box doesn’t match — the ability to decode H.265 streams. The new box also packs the Mali-450 GPU from ARM, up from the Mali-400 in the Mi Box. Neither one of these are going to blow the doors off a device, but they’ll offer reasonable performance for chosen workloads.


The upgrade to the Cortex-A7 makes sense, in fact, if the goal is to offer a device that can handle an H.265 workload. One of the differences between HEVC and H.264 is that the former is more heavily parallelized and requires more cores for efficient software decoding. The Mali-450 design is too old to include an H.265 hardware decoder, so either Xiaomi paired it with a different decoder block from ARM or they’re going to rely strictly on the CPU for hardware decode.

Google’s Chromecast, in fact, is starting to look a bit long in the tooth by comparison to later solutions with more capable hardware, Dolby DTS support, and H.265 options. If this product performs as promised, it could be one of the most capable streaming devices on the market. It’s already more powerful, at least on paper, than Amazon’s Fire Stick, which the company announced last fall, and significantly better than Roku’s stick-based streaming option as well.

Products like this are a good way for the company to potentially establish a foothold in US markets. Customers who are unlikely to take a chance on an unknown vendor for a $600 smartphone may be willing to take a risk on a $32 TV tuner (pricing on the Mi Box Mini hasn’t been announced, so treat that $30 figure as a ballpark). The US is one of the largest markets for electronics in the world and devices like the Mi Box Mini often offer functionality that Smart TVs have struggled to deliver in attractive bundles.