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Amazon Fire TV: A Nice Device For Internet Video Streaming

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  • #11
    Originally posted by curaga View Post
    That thing has some nice specs:

    Qualcomm Krait 300, quad-core to 1.7 Ghz
    GPU Qualcomm Adreno 320
    Storage 8 GB internal
    Memory 2 GB LPDDR2 @ 533 MHZ

    Not often do you see 2gb ram on an ARM box.
    fyi, spec-wise, it is rather close to the inforce ifc6410 board ($149). The inforce board has gigabit ethernet (and 2G of DDR3 vs 2G of LPDDR2), and a SATA connector. Both have wifi/bluetooth. But the amazon-tv has digital audio. According to the inforce web site, there is a ifc6412 coming in near future ($99.. seems to have same apq8064/snapdragon-600 as fire tv and ifc6410, but other than that not sure what the differences are yet).

    But the amazon-tv will look somewhat nicer next to my TV than a bare arm board + hardrive + bunch of cables. But otoh, if someone actually did make a decent pico-itx case (for the inforce boards), that wouldn't be such an issue. ;-)

    I get my fire-tv on Thurs.. so I really hope we manage to root it (although, I'm pretty sure amazon has done their best to make this a hard challenge). If rooted, it could make a nice replacement for my current xbmc setup. Once we get it rooted, we should be able to use the same userspace that we already use on various other snapdragon boards and devices (dragonboard, ifc641x, bStem, etc). XBMC already runs nicely with freedreno, and software decode should be fine for up to 720p (as long as thermal throttling doesn't kick in, which shouldn't be much of a problem from what I've seen in the fire-tv teardowns). Hopefully soon someone has some time to work on hw video decode.

    Compared to a phone/tablet, it doesn't have the USB OTG connector brought out, so getting at fastboot may be, umm, interesting. I'm hopefully that we manage to figure out something, although no guarantees that it isn't a hardware hack. One of my friends already has his and is playing around with trying to solder up the debug UART connector on the pcb, and trying to figure out what that 16 pad connector behind the SoC is. (My guess is some sort of connector for a debug breakout board with JTAG, and maybe if I'm lucky USB OTG.)

    Fwiw, interesting factoid: amazon's open src code drop for the fire tv (aka the-big-tarball) contains a modified grub 0.97 src tree... which initially had my hopes up, but at this point it seems to be built for x86. Maybe at one point amazon had two competing designs in development in parallel, one x86 based and on with the snapdragon.

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    • #12
      Oh, you can actually buy one of those ifc6410 boards. I recall when Qualcomm boards were not purchasable by mere mortals.

      Case-wise, what good is using an existing standard (pico-itx) and then placing ports on several edges.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by curaga View Post
        Oh, you can actually buy one of those ifc6410 boards. I recall when Qualcomm boards were not purchasable by mere mortals.

        Case-wise, what good is using an existing standard (pico-itx) and then placing ports on several edges.
        yup, mere mortals can buy 'em.. there was a bit of a back order when they first started shipping last year. For ifc6410, all the ports you'd need once everything is installed (assuming you are using hdmi audio rather than headphone jack) are on the back edge.

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        • #14
          I've seen multiple online reviews which say 802.11b/g/n yet Amazon's own site says 802.11a/b/g/n. So which is it?

          Are the reviewers just copying and pasting something Amazon sent them, which is different from what's on Amazon's site?

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          • #15
            Originally posted by linuxjacques View Post
            I've seen multiple online reviews which say 802.11b/g/n yet Amazon's own site says 802.11a/b/g/n. So which is it?

            Are the reviewers just copying and pasting something Amazon sent them, which is different from what's on Amazon's site?
            according to the ifixit teardown, the wireless/bluetooth part is:



            so, 802.11a/b/g/n

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            • #16
              So, is this why they disable XBMC support for Amazon Prime, so they can sell their own crappy hardware? No thanks, I'll stick to XBMC.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by sarmad View Post
                So, is this why they disable XBMC support for Amazon Prime, so they can sell their own crappy hardware? No thanks, I'll stick to XBMC.
                well, *if* we can manage to get it rooted enough to load our own kernel, then linux+xbmc on this thing should be a possibility ;-)

                ofc would be nice if it wasn't as locked down as it is.. good thing x86 laptops/desktops aren't as locked down as android devices..

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