Anyone have one? What does it do?

Sorry I know thats a bit vague but someone recommended it but I’m not exactly sure what it does.

Friend has a Minix Box from Droidsticks. It is basically a powerful small PC, running Kodi/XBMC with a shit load of add ons that enable you to watch anything through the Interwebz. Sports, Movies, TV series, it has got it all. Quality of Live TV is pretty poor, HD quality is on par with SD TV aerial signal, but movies and TV series can be very good quality.

There are lots of versions about, it is not limited to Minix, you can run it on a Pi, but it will run slowly, I run it on an ATV and the menu’s are a little slow, but the playback is not affected. You can even run this on an iPhone or any android tablet or windows PC.

Probably as well to get a Amazon Fire TV stick and side load Kodi/TVBMC on to it(which is exactly what I have done).

Takes a bit of faffing to get it all set up but once done seems to work very well especially for £35 all in.

All the info needed is on the web.

Do I need to be tech savvy to use it or can I just plug it in and start using it?

Anyone looking into XBMC/Kodi that doesn’t neccesarily want to go to the hassle of building and maintaining a media PC should seriously look at this..

OpenELEC

It’s a Kodi approved custom Linux build with Kodi, tiny install of around 300MB and pretty much plug and play on almost any hardware. They have teamed up with a hardware manufacturer recently and the boxes they are selling look like good value and come ready to just plug in and use.
Having said this, you have to bear in mind that Netflix/ Amazon Prime etc. mostly don’t work within Kodi, there is a Netflix plugin but it basically screen scrapes the Netflix website and doesn’t work that well. If things like that are something you need then a Roku2/3 box or a FireTV are a better bet with either Plex or Kodi installed.
I’m not completely certain as I use a ChromeBox with Kodi but I don’t think you need to sideload Kodi on the FireTV anymore, I think it’s been approved for FireTV on the Amazon store.

Edit: Also be aware if you aren’t already that Kodi is really designed to work with locally stored media i.e DVD/BluRay ‘backups’. A box for streaming is different and the aforementioned Roku/FireTV/SmartTV are a much better and cheaper bet for that purpose.

Re.Amazon fire TV and kodi, its a bit more involved than it used to be since Amazon pulled kodi from the app store.
Originally you could download and instal it directly but now you have to sideload it the same as you would sideload a app onto a Android phone.

You can buy new preconfigured Fire sticks on eBay where someone else has done the legwork all ready but they charge a premium (circa £51 whereas a new firestick is £35).

Once done its really straightforward to use.

Loddrik , we have a sumvision Cyclone from digital promo in Aintree £60 if I recall …plug it in and away you go