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Amazon Fire TV: A Nice Device For Internet Video Streaming

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  • Amazon Fire TV: A Nice Device For Internet Video Streaming

    Phoronix: Amazon Fire TV: A Nice Device For Internet Video Streaming

    This week Amazon unveiled the Fire TV as a small network appliance primarily for HD video streaming and complemented by some gaming and mobile app capabilities. The Fire TV is powered by Amazon's Android-based Kindle Fire OS so in this weekend review are my initial impressions of this Linux-based media system after using it the past two days.

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Does the voice search work with non-amazon instant video applications such as Netflix? Is there any ability to stream media from a local fileserver/external HD?

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    • #3
      I don't know. I own two Kindle Fire tablets. Except for the Amazon Video content (which is good), they are awful. You can't use Google Play. You can't get regular android apps. It's basically not much better than using an Apple device. And to make things worse, the older of the two (1st Gen Kindle) is having the charging problems that many people reported (it just refuses to charge). Amazon won't help.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by peppercats View Post
        Does the voice search work with non-amazon instant video applications such as Netflix? Is there any ability to stream media from a local fileserver/external HD?
        Nope. Hopefully an update will come out supporting this feature since it is one of the features that is frustrating most customers.

        Don't know about the second question. But I imagine you can side-load content onto the sdcard. For a local fileserver, you'd have the overhead of playing through the Silk browser, but I think it's possible. Can anyone confirm?

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        • #5
          Originally posted by FourDMusic View Post
          Nope. Hopefully an update will come out supporting this feature since it is one of the features that is frustrating most customers.

          Don't know about the second question. But I imagine you can side-load content onto the sdcard. For a local fileserver, you'd have the overhead of playing through the Silk browser, but I think it's possible. Can anyone confirm?
          Oh, that's a shame. Was going to buy one for my mother if it was easily voice navigatable as she gets lost in the roku I got her for Christmas a fair bit.

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          • #6
            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.

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            • #7
              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.
              dolby digital plus, optical audio out and hdmi 1.4b too. It has nice specs for a very cheap linux box, just buy a card reader with lots of usb ports built in and you have a pretty sweet htpc/linux pc once you have rooted it and installed linux and xbmc.

              It is a shame that it is 10/100 ethernet and not 10/100/1000 but that isn't the end of the world.

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              • #8
                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.
                Ah, that is a good point. Has anyone hacked it to run a vanilla Linux distro yet? Does it even have a Linux friendly BIOS?

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                • #9
                  a bargain? a bargain!

                  The voice is processed within Amazon's cloud but the results were near instant and [..]
                  So you donated your voice profile?

                  To some surprise, the device was already associated with my Amazon Prime account as soon as [..]
                  Surprise? Irony? Please clarify.

                  Soon as the device was connected there was some system updates to be applied
                  Did you receive a plain image or did you feel targeted?

                  for the living room [..] [..] At $99 USD the device isn't a bad deal assuming [..]
                  Yes indeed. But why do you mention its price 6 (six) times in the article? Conventional inteligence would have charged a few bucks (knowing that and when you bought a device, when you're watching, what you're watching, when you switch channels, kindle, voice profile, linking to your Amazon interests. This seems costly. Does the device include a browser? Where can you turn on cookies?) so it's probably common sense that this is not a bad deal.

                  And if you look closer there might be a marketing vector in your hand potentially a few times a day:
                  http://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer..._firetv_16_lrg
                  This might be worth one or the other cent in the long run.
                  We know we maybe had better bought some Amazon shares a while ago but I would be enthusiastic if you could give me a tip where to buy some N SA shares?

                  Have a good day!

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                  • #10
                    Price

                    So if I buy stream 10 movies per month from Amazon and have a sub to Showtime then I would be paying the same amount as my DirecTV service which has more channels and movies; I can hear the $$$ rolling in for the IPTV people. The ignorance is stroooong with the Public on this one.

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