Measured, not promised
We run the same benchmark on a real budget Android TV after every change that could affect speed, so a slowdown is caught before it reaches your TV. These are the numbers:
- Cold start from tap to the guide
- 655 ms
- Channel switch median, 1080i channel
- ≈1 s
- CPU while playing 1080i H.264
- 23%
- Memory while playing
- 87 MB
- App size the whole APK
- 2.4 MB
Measured with our benchmark script on a budget 2K Android 11 TV with under 1 GB of RAM, playing a 1080i H.264 channel (MuskTV 0.1.0, October 2026). Your numbers will depend on your device and provider.
Why IPTV apps lag on cheap boxes
A budget box usually has a slow quad-core chip, 1 or 2 GB of memory shared with the graphics, and slow storage. Apps designed for phones and tablets load large frameworks, keep big video buffers, decode in software and redraw the whole guide on every key press. On a phone that's fine; on a box it shows up as slow starts, black screens between channels and a guide that stutters while you scroll.
How MuskTV stays light
- A 2.4 MB app: no web views, no game engine, no bundled ad or tracking SDKs. Less to load means a faster start.
- Hardware decoding: video goes to the box's video decoder, leaving the CPU free for the interface.
- Small live buffers: playback starts as soon as there is enough to show a picture, so channel changes take about a second.
- A fresh decoder for every channel: cheap decoders get unstable after many switches; MuskTV starts clean every time.
- A guide drawn by hand: the TV guide grid is drawn directly instead of with thousands of views, so it scrolls with live video playing.
- Streaming parsers: huge playlists and guides are read as they download. 433,000 programmes load in 38 seconds on a 1 GB box, without blocking the picture.
- Nothing added to the start: update and licence checks wait until after the first channel is playing.
Light, and still recovers on its own
Low-end hardware also means flaky Wi-Fi and decoders that crash. MuskTV reconnects after network drops of any length, restarts a frozen stream, and restarts the decoder after a crash, all without you touching the remote. When a channel really can't play, it says why ("the provider refused this channel", "3840×1600 HEVC isn't supported by this TV") instead of spinning forever.
Tips for a slow box
- Use a wired Ethernet connection if your box has a port; it beats Wi-Fi for live TV.
- Uninstall apps you don't use and keep at least a few hundred MB of storage free.
- Restart the box once in a while; cheap boxes rarely free memory properly.
- Hide the channel groups you never watch (press MENU on a category, then Hide category). A shorter list is quicker to browse.
Questions
Will it run on a box with 1 GB of RAM?
Yes. MuskTV is developed and benchmarked on a TV with under 1 GB of RAM. It uses about 87 MB while playing a 1080i channel.
Will it run on an old Android version?
MuskTV needs Android 6.0 or newer, which covers almost every Android TV box still in use.
Can a cheap box play 4K channels?
That depends on the box's video chip, not on the player. MuskTV uses hardware decoding, so whatever the chip supports will play; if it can't, MuskTV tells you the format so you know why.