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2018 - Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K
Anybody tried leia rc1? Can't get a picture on my 4K firestick beta 5 is fine.
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I splurged on an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K at £35 on Amazon UK.  Interesting little device.  Having Volume +/- and Mute on the remote (which control my TV/AVR volume) is very useful and a major improvement over the previous Fire TV 4K pendant.  Alexa integration is also quite useful if you have Alexa devices already configured for smart control of lighting etc.

I already had a neat USB 2.0 OTG adaptor https://www.amazon.co.uk/Degree-Angled-A...00M7XQ6O2/  which has a Micro-USB B male and female and a USB-A socket and fits very neatly on the Fire TV Stick 4K. This allows you to use the existing Amazon PSU and Micro USB B cable, and then plug in a USB Hub, Ethernet adaptor etc. to the USB A port. I have an Anker USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet adaptor + 3 x USB3.0 Hub I use with an Intel Compute Stick and it seems to work fine via the OTG adaptor. USB Storage (FAT32) and Cabled networking connectivity both worked OOB.  I haven't checked connection speeds yet.

Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard paired fine and works as expected (useful for Kodi commands that aren't mapped to the Fire TV remote.)

Kodi Leia RC1 32 bit downloaded to a USB stick on a laptop installed fine via Total Commander.  

So far :

PCM 5.1 and DD output appears to be supported.  No HD Audio bit streaming.
HDR10 content appears to carry valid metadata - but with my current Whitelisting although I have 2160p59.94 default resolution (and 2160p59.94 whitelisted), 2160p59.94 HDR10 content is played at 1080p59.94 in HDR10...  I'll do a bit more digging on this.
Deinterlacing for SD MPEG2 seems to be 2x, but for HD H264 seems to be either 1x or not happening at first glance.  1080p and 720p content is fine, but 1080i native content has 25Hz motion.  This isn't a good solution for Live TV at the moment.  No deinterlacing options are presented in video settings.  In Live TV it's also unusual to get 1080i H264 to display at all.
SMB access to my unRAID server works fine.  

(MrMC allows me to access OSX SMB shares, I've not managed to get Leia RC1 to yet)
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In fact beta 5 didn't work either on this particular HD Ready TV, the problem was I had manually edit the settings to limit the gui to 720, surely a virgin install should be set to a safe limit?
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What is the easiest way to upload advancedsettings.xml to the fire stick? Would like to avoid the hassle of OTG cables etc just for this purpose.

Can i do it within Kodi or with ADB?
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You can via ADB, but I find it easier w/ESFileExplorer or Xplore, and copying over from a network share location.
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Tend to use x-plore but don't think it is available in my country for whatever reason on fire devices.

ES Explorer was painful to use with a remote but did the job.
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Interesting.  An early UK TV 1080i25 Blu-ray release rip (H264) is a green and flashy blocky mess on the Fire TV Stick 4.  A different, later release, 1080i25 H264 Blu-ray rip plays OK (In both cases the content is 25p - there is no intra-frame motion)

Both play fine on a current LibreElec install on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

Have tried with both Media Codec (Surface) and Media Codec disabled (i.e. both enabled or one or other other disabled)

Log is here : http://paste.kodi.tv/ekixecenox
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You can use the Downloader app and install Xplore by typing in below in the URL bar:
​​​​​​​
Code:
https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/lonely-cat-games/x-plore-file-manager/x-plore-file-manager-4-10-01-release/x-plore-file-manager-4-10-01-android-apk-download/download/
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(2018-11-23, 19:29)stammie Wrote:  Can you download the video here LG Chess demo and try it from your NAS please?
I'll be very impressed if a 10/100 adapter can handle this file.
Alternatively do you have an uncompressed remux of John Wick in 4K/HDR? That movie is another good stresser of a 10/100 connection, the funeral scene or the airfield driving scene near the start of the movie should tell you if that adapter can really handle full bitrate 4K files.
I don’t have John Wick, but downloaded the chess demo & it played without issue. The only problem I’ve come across with UHD files (& am not sure if this is a hardware limitation of the stick itself or a connection speed one), but when you skip ahead through some movies it can screw things up - anywhere from totaling crashing, audio sync issues, video stuttering, etc.
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(2018-11-25, 03:40)ukyank Wrote:
(2018-11-23, 19:29)stammie Wrote:  
I don’t have John Wick, but downloaded the chess demo & it played without issue. The only problem I’ve come across with UHD files (& am not sure if this is a hardware limitation of the stick itself or a connection speed one), but when you skip ahead through some movies it can screw things up - anywhere from totaling crashing, audio sync issues, video stuttering, etc. 
Thanks, I'm impressed the 10/100 adapter can play the chess demo without any other tweaks needed.
On my 1st gen Vero 4K which has the same type of ethernet port I could only get high bitrate files like that playing correctly if I set up autofs or fstab on it.
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I was hoping to replace my aging WDTV Streaming Media Player with this device. But the WDTV plays all the videos on my NAS over WIFI flawlessly, and the FTV4K does not (and, perhaps obviously, these are not even UHD high bitrate videos, because the WDTV wouldn't play those at all). I do not believe this is a Kodi problem because VLC has exactly the same problem with these videos (I'm using Kodi v18 RC1, by the way).

Some videos will only play smoothly if I turn OFF hardware decoding, and some don't play smoothly no matter what. By not playing smoothly, I don't mean a micro-stutter every several seconds; these videos seem to play like every frame is displayed twice (though the video remains in sync with the audio).

And finally, all DVD ISO images play with a flashing green screen every 1 or 2 seconds.

I have fiddled with Kodi's, VLC's and the FTV4K's display settings (white list, adjust display refresh rate, etc) and nothing makes any discernible difference (other than disabling hardware decoding, with limited success).

In case anybody is interested, here is the info of a file that plays smoothly only with hardware decoding turned off:

Video
ID                                       : 0
Format                                   : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile                           : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings                          : BVOP1 / Custom Matrix
Format settings, BVOP                    : 1
Format settings, QPel                    : No
Format settings, GMC                     : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix                  : Custom
Muxing mode                              : Packed bitstream
Codec ID                                 : XVID
Codec ID/Hint                            : XviD
Duration                                 : 1 h 40 min
Bit rate                                 : 2 656 kb/s
Width                                    : 1 280 pixels
Height                                   : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate                               : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.120
Stream size                              : 1.86 GiB (85%)


Here is the info of a file that doesn't play smoothly no matter what:

Video
ID                                       : 0
Format                                   : MPEG-4 Visual
Format settings                          : BVOP1 / GMC2
Format settings, BVOP                    : 1
Format settings, QPel                    : No
Format settings, GMC                     : 2 warppoints
Format settings, Matrix                  : Default (H.263)
Muxing mode                              : Packed bitstream
Codec ID                                 : DX50
Codec ID/Hint                            : DivX 5
Duration                                 : 27 min 38 s
Bit rate                                 : 1 021 kb/s
Width                                    : 528 pixels
Height                                   : 400 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 4:3
Frame rate                               : 25.000 FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.193
Stream size                              : 202 MiB (95%)
Writing library                          : DivX 5.0.2 (UTC 2002-05-16)
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I also do have perfect audio and video including adjusted framerates when disabling MediaCodec and MediaCodec Surface completely. Forwarding/Rewinding also is smooth like charm. So far i am very, very pleased with that little stick. Had an Fire TV 1. Gen before. With MediaCodec enabled, there are some files that sometimes play good, sometimes dont. Could not recognize a pattern within those files.

Tested with 17.6 and 18 RC1.
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Thanks, but my problem is that some videos stutter badly when I disable MediaCodec and others stutter badly no matter what. Plus, I still have the issue of green screen flashing on DVD images. Again, all play perfectly on the WDTV.
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Is it possible to have Kodi running all the time on the FTS?  I just want it to be as simple as possible from TV on to Kodi.

I usually have a WeTek play which is always running Kodi - I can switch on my TV by using the Android Kore remote to wake up the box.
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If you guys haven't do so, play 4K HDR videos from J&K's YouTube channel. Just amazing HDR visuals! I tried Amazon's Silk browser & got Rec.709, but with Smart YouTube TV, I get Rec.2020 HDR 10-bit!
[H]i-[d]eft [M]edia [K]een [V]ideosaurus
My Family Room Theater
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2018 - Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K3