Amazon Fire Tv Stick $24 Staples

[Drastic]

I picked one up and hooked it up, it's updating. I don't even know what all it does, I just know you can run xbmc on it and it has an app or plugin for plex. I'm tired of the attn my raspberry pi requires.

[JasonD]

Oilman has been raving about his Amazon Fire stick over on FB and clearly prefers it to the Chromecast.

[Drastic]

It seems ok if you are an amazon content consumer.

pos otherwise, well for my uses.

Can sideload xbmc, which runs great! However some kind of image processing going on destroys mkv video quality.

Internal player works great for video quality, but can't get surround sound out of it.

Plex sucks on it. I'm finding plex just sucks in general due to crappy device support.

Loading TVMC was pretty cool, lots of free streaming stuff out there. Keeping it for this if nothing else. Plus ain't worth the time to get $25 bucks back.

[jetboy]

I'd like sticks to act an a DLNA clients for my KooRaRoo (www.kooraroo.com) media server. I have Devolo dLAN powerline network adaptors next to the TVs, so a wired solution would have far better bandwidth. I'm currently using XBox 360s as clients, but they're noisy and light on video streaming features. Would a hacked Amazon Fire stick work for this (other than the wired ethernet), or is there anything else on the market that's cheap and suitable?

[Drastic]

I don't know of any dlna support, but if you're not using surround audio plex might probably work. I say might b/c the brain surgeons over at plex put their support forums for xbox clients behind a paid login. Not familiar with kooraroo.

Surprisingly the stick did a good job of streaming 1080p/dts mkv rip over wifi, no problems except the video quality issue I noted above which doesn't relate to bandwidth.

[rcjordan]

>Plex sucks on it. I'm finding plex just sucks in general due to crappy device support.

I know super-tech guys who work in the Cisco group that have given up on plex. These guys are running *serious* home servers and they can't keep it running well enough to let their families use it without providing oft-required support. Screw dat!

[Drastic]

yep. xbmc center is not much better for user friendliness, but the support (and functionality) is miles ahead.

There is hope some dev will fix xbmc (soon to be named kodi) on the stick, and I'm still playing around with it, but not holding my breath.