Xiaomi has just made the official announcement regarding the release of the Mi Box 4 and Mi Box 4c. As of now, both of these products will only be released in the Chinese market. The latter one, the Mi Box 4c, is more of a budget-minded device. Though Mi Box was released internationally, there are multiple versions available only in China. The devices, designed exclusively for China, run the custom MIUI TV interface. In the rest of the world, these devices run Android TV. Any sort of news regarding the worldwide release of these recent devices is yet to be announced by Xiaomi.
The Mi Box 4 is more like an ecosystem device, capable of relaying messages about the status of other Mi devices on the TV. It can accept voice commands through the remote as well. The software seems to be the sole selling point of these devices since the hardware is not really up to the mark compared to the internationally released Mi Box. If we compare the two new devices, the Mi Box 4 is the more powerful one. But the Amlogic S905L chipset lacks the hardware decoding support for VP9.
On the other hand, the internationally released Mi Box uses the Amlogic S905X-H, which can support the royalty-free codec. This codec is used vastly by YouTube. Apart from that, there aren’t many differences between the Mi Box 4 and the international Mi Box. The Mi Box 4c lacks Bluetooth support but comes with an IR remote.
The Box 4 has a 1.5 GHz 64-bit Quad-Core Amlogic S905L Cortex-A53 CPU whereas the 4c has an Amlogic Cortex-A53 with 1.5 GHz 64-bit Quadcore GPU Mali-450 and 750 MHz 3+2 core.
Box 4 has 2GB RAM compared to the 1GB RAM of 4c. Both these devices come with 8GB internal storage and support the 802.11 b/g/n, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi.
Both of these devices support the highest resolution of 4K(3840 x 2160) and can smoothly play HDR Video of H.265 4K @ 60 fps and of H.264 4K @ 30 fps. MPEG 1/2/4, VC-1, DivX 4/5 up to 1080p @ 60fps.
The Mi Box 4 and 4c are priced at 349 Yuan and 249 Yuan ($55.19 and $39.38) respectively. The shipping is expected to begin February 1st.
Source: Mi
