The two weeks since Playbill v0.1 landed have been about polish. The kind that does not change what you see on screen so much as what it feels like to live with the box. 4K movies play smoothly now. The case is quieter and the buttons are where your hand expects them. The full desktop side of the box is more capable too, for users who want to do their own work on it. And every step of getting there is written down for anyone else thinking about building on the same hardware.
4K movies, finally smooth
Local 4K files now play without dropping a frame. Movie nights look the way movie nights are supposed to look on a TV, with the video hardware doing the heavy lifting instead of the CPU breaking a sweat. Bigger files, longer runtimes, no stutter, no fan whine kicking in mid-scene.
Streaming services: the honest part
If you mostly watch through a browser-based streaming service (Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and the rest), here is the honest expectation today: standard HD is smooth, full HD is workable, 4K through the browser is not realistic on this hardware yet. The reason is in how the chip's open-source graphics support works, and we walk through it in the public docs. For the best picture, play local 4K files. We are not done chasing the browser side, but we will not pretend it is solved when it is not.
The case, revised for daily use
A week of actually using the box surfaced some small frustrations, so the case got a small revision driven entirely by them:
- Power button on the front, where your hand naturally goes. No more reaching behind the unit.
- Audio jack on the back, tucked out of the way with the rest of the permanent wiring you set up once and forget.
- Quieter fan. The first version varied fan speed with temperature and parked it in the whiny part of its range too often. The new version is on when the chip is warm, off when it cools, and never humming in between. Noticeably calmer at rest.
None of these change what Playbill does. They change what it feels like to use, and that matters.
It is also a real desktop you can build on
Playbill is an entertainment center first, but the box underneath is a full Linux desktop, yours to do whatever you want with. Plug in a keyboard and mouse during the day and it is a perfectly capable little workstation. All of the chip's hardware is available to you for your own projects, including the onboard AI accelerator, so whether that means training models, light development, or something else entirely, the door is open. Nothing is locked down. It is your computer.
For anyone else looking at this board
The Radxa Dragon Q6A is a genuinely capable little board. It is also a board with sharp edges, and most of the past two weeks went into learning where they are. Rather than keep that knowledge to ourselves, we wrote it down: a roughly 700-line lessons-learned document, public in the Playbill repo, organized by topic and honest about the places we got something wrong before we got it right.
If you are considering this board for your own project, whether that is robotics, a media server, a kiosk, an industrial panel, or something nobody has tried yet, the answers you would otherwise spend a week digging out are sitting there waiting for you. That is the part of open source we care about most. Not just shipping the code, but shipping the path that got the code working, so the next person picks up speed faster than we did.
What is next
The prebuilt Playbill image download is still on deck, so flashing it onto a board will feel as simple as flashing a Raspberry Pi. The browser-video gap stays on the list. The box keeps getting quieter, faster, and easier to live with, which has been the whole point all along.
The repo: TrailCurrentPlaybill. The lessons doc: docs/RADXA_LESSONS_LEARNED.md.