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2018 - Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K
By the way I am curious if someone else can test with a shield tv. But to me it looks like the image quality of the firestick 4k is somehow a bit better then the shieldtv. Anyone else notice the same?
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(2018-11-30, 12:47)Jemus Wrote: Did anyone test wifi speeds using Magic iPerf?
As I read through the last pages of the thread it seems like everyone just tests the performance by trying to play so high bitrate media.
I would be interested in iperf results.
 I'm not an iperf expert but I sideloaded Magic Iperf onto my Fire TV Stick 4K and ran iPerf 3 on Mac OS on my MacBook.

I ran on MacBook :
Code:
iperf3 -s

and in Magic iperf on my Fire TV Stick 4K :
Code:
iperf3 -u -c IPADDRESSOFMAC -b 1000M -t 60 -i 5 -P 10

With a USB 2.0 OTG adaptor connected to an Anker USB 3.0->GigE adaptor+USB3.0 hub on my FireTV Stick 4K and a Thunderbolt GigE adaptor on my MacBook Pro I achieved 270Mb/s throughput reported by both ends of iPerf.

With the FireTV Stick 4K's internal WiFi adaptor connected to a Ubiquiti 802.11ac access point (situated in a different room in my small, London, flat) on the same network (and the MacBook Pro still running via the same Thunderbolt adaptor - not also on WiFi) I achieved an average of 79Mb/s throughput (varying between 70Mbs and 83Mbs)
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Has anyone mapped a keyboard with the Fire TV Stick 4k so I can use keyboard shortcuts while in Kodi?   I was able to do this on the shield, but I had to send it back due to the 1080i issue.   I'm in the US so I may give the Fire TV Stick a try since it "should" work with 1080i mpeg2 broadcasts.
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(2018-11-30, 16:31)scokat916 Wrote: Has anyone mapped a keyboard with the Fire TV Stick 4k so I can use keyboard shortcuts while in Kodi?   I was able to do this on the shield, but I had to send it back due to the 1080i issue.   I'm in the US so I may give the Fire TV Stick a try since it "should" work with 1080i mpeg2 broadcasts.
 Yes - Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard pairs fine, as did a no-name mini bluetooth keyboard.
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(2018-11-30, 12:47)Jemus Wrote: Did anyone test wifi speeds using Magic iPerf?
As I read through the last pages of the thread it seems like everyone just tests the performance by trying to play so high bitrate media.
I would be interested in iperf results.
 I used the built in System X-Ray app.

Image
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I have.. unless my eyes decieve me
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I did a little tests on the fire tv 4k with Kodi 18 RC1, here my reports

Audio delay issue for every ac3, you have to set +600ms.
Audio delay issue for every acc, you have to set +100ms.
I use perfect player app for iptv service and there is no audio delay, so must be something in kodi i guess.
I tried also archos video player but it won't start any video for some reason, it's stuck on circle spinner for ever.
A lot of stuttering for various h265 files but if you start to go back and forward for some reason it fix itself.
Deinterlacing contents for livetv (Italy) is poor for sd channel (mpeg2). It won't even start 1080i channel at least with the enigma2 pvr addon (It work flawless on my nVidia shield)
Deinterlacing contents for dvds is also poor.
Because I got the uk version and I'm in Italy and I can't use the prime video app i've tried the prime video addon with kodi and it works perfect at 1080p.
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You can sideload the prime video apk, search google and you'll find it. It works great.

As for the stuttering, it happens on the first launch, after stopping and playing again, it doesn't anymore. Audio delays are there, but consistent. 200ms on a truehd video.
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I still got stuttering even if i try to reload 2-3 times. But i noticed that if I turn off the autoframerate and i start the video a 60hz instead of 23.976hz there's no stuttering, at least not a big one, obviously there's a little bit  'cause the pulldown conversion. I guess it's a problem caused by the autoframerate changing and it occur only in h265 codec. So far, no problems with h264.
Unfortunately the apk does not change the framerate automatically, at least in the 4.7.9 version.
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@noggin @Hitcher 
Thanks for posting your wifi speed results. I thought the 2018 FireTV stick would perform better because of the MiMo 2x2 standard. Thought it might be comparable to a laptop or smartphone using MiMo 2x2. But results seem way, way lower than these.
Actually even my MiBox is faster with about 170-180mbit/s and it is just using wifi ac without MiMo 2x2.

But your wifi routers do support MiMo?
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About the stuttering with h265 files, I just tried to open one of those with perfect player app and it does autoframerate to 23.976hz without any issue, no stuttering at all. I hope the kodi team is gonna fix this issue on the firestick 4k.
I don't know, I'm the only one or someone else has the same problem with h265 files?
The suggestion from dekomote to open, stop and reopen the same file doesn't work, at least for me.
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Debug log?
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I just opened a new thread in video support for more visibility, lol, but anyway, this is the log.

https://paste.kodi.tv/ajewatufas.kodi
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(2018-11-19, 00:12)Raboon Wrote: Bad news about this little beast.

[1.] The audio does not sync when watching Amazon's own content. It is about 200ms out, audio ahead of the video.
All other apps are in sync (iPlayer, Kodi etc) so you cannot compensate for the AV offset without knocking the apps out.
Pretty pathetic.

[2.] Further, no matter the app the audio drops out for about a half second around 44 minutes through video playback. A noticeable dropout. This has occurred on Prime Video, iPlayer and Kodi.

With the sync issue I was resigned to using Kodi and the various apps, ignoring Prime content as the Stick is so cheap compared to its competition, but that dropout is a dealbreaker.

I've tried a full reset, running the Stick with various different settings - Dolby Plus off, on stereo only, tried 60Hz, tried 50Hz...) all kinds of flim flam like swapping HDMI ports to fix it... to no avail.
It is up to Amazon to get the software up to par. Considering how obvious the two errors are, I don't understand what is going on over there in Seattle.

Not a good start.
@Raboon Hi there and welcome to the kodi forum.

May I ask what an AVR brand and Model you own?
  1. I have very similar Issues with my Onkyo TX-NR616 (old 2012 Model). My async is approx. 180ms (audio ahead of video) when playing 23.976fps content via prime video. All other apps - that unfortunately (!) do not support the new auto refresh rate matching (cinema mode) - are in Sync. When I disable LipSync in my AVRs settings, the async doubles to around 360ms, while netflix etc. then gets an async of 180ms, which indicates that LipSync is clearly adequately correcting the async of 60fps content. So HDMI LipSync seems to work, except that there is apparently a factor 2 missing in the correction offset for 23.976 content.
    • Funny thing is: I remember that when @wrxtasy and @Raybuntu began to develop LibreELEC based on Krypton for Odroid C2 over a year ago the same issue became introduced while the prior LibreELEC Odroid C2 builds based on Kodi Jarvis didn't had this audio async issues. I don't know why, but it seemed to have gotten fixed then somehow somewhen. And now I see the very same issue on the brand new Fire TV 4k stick. Besides... On my brothers setup (Marantz SR7008) the stick has also a very noticeable async. But there I hadn't the chance to measure it by trial and error. I guess it should vary from TV to TV, since picture processing of modern TVs takes usually different amounts of time depending on the model and brand.

  2. I experience these audio drop outs as well. If you hadn't written it, I would have newer noticed it as a reproducible issue. Here it is occurring every 46:31 mmConfuseds or 46:30. Not sure exactly. Either you have stopped the time inaccurately or the approx 2.5 minutes difference in our audio drop out interval is due to the difference in our audio async (180ms vs 200ms). Perhaps there is a connection between audio async and audio drop out.
    • Also this audio drop out does not occur when the Fire TV stick is connected directly to the TV, hence it is an issue that is somehow related to AVR-Use-Case
    • And also I could not always find anomalies in Fire TV logcat that I could relate to the dropout when an audio dropout occurred. This is very strange and leads to the fact that this dropout may happen only on the AVRs side so that the Fire TV does not always notice it. Though, such things do not happen on any other device here (FireTV Box 2, Raspberry Pi 2, Odroid C2), that is why I do not believe that it is a bug of my onkyo receiver.
      Sometimes (but not always at least on PrimeVideo always) I can find such entries in logcat when dropout occurs:
      1:
      11-30 20:14:36.896 275 21346 D AudioALSAPlaybackHandlerTunnelHDMI: +drain() W 16384, R 18324, Underrun 1, type 0
      11-30 20:14:36.897 275 21346 D AudioALSAPlaybackHandlerTunnelHDMI: -drain()re 0, W 0, R 0, Underrun 1
      11-30 20:14:36.900 275 21346 D AudioTunnelStreamOut: alsaUnderFlowCheck() Underrun hanppen 1, reset mAFSinkedFrames = 0
      11-30 20:14:36.901 275 21346 D AudioALSAPlaybackHandlerTunnelHDMI: resetUnderflowStatus() set kUnderrun flag = 0
      11-30 20:14:36.901 275 21346 D AudioTunnelStreamOut: -resetUnderflowState() reset kUnderrunFlag,ret 0
Perhaps some of you guys also noticed the bug that the Fire TV Stick 4k is deactivating the "auto frame rate matching" after reboot, because it sets resolution from automatic to 1080p60. This also only happens if the FireTV is connected to an AVR instead of directly to TV.

So clearly the Fire TV Stick 4K has still a lot of HDMI issues that need to be addressed by amazon. Hopefully they are open for bug fixing. Though I am quite shocked that they didn't notice the audio async during quality assurance. Cannot imagine that they do not test their top selling media player for compatibility with A/V receivers prior to throwing it on the market.

Also worth mentioning regarding Fire TV Stick 4K: It is always playing back Dolby Didital or Dolby Digital Plus (depending on your equipment), even while browsing through the Fire TV GUI/interface. That means that the Fire TV Stick apparently does some kind of dolby digital plus live encoding, as even 2.0 sources (which output as PCM 2.0 on my Fire TV 2 Box) are outputted in dolby digital plus 2.0 to my Receiver. If connected to my TV, everything is outputtet as 2.0 Dolby Digital if the source is stereo PCM 2.0. Actually that's the first time I see a device doing dolby digital plus live encoding. That may also explain how the new audio dialogue gain feature works: It may be implemented as a metadata of dolby digital (plus) DRC / Center gain. Though even if I have dialogue gain/boost (or whatever it is called in english Fire TV menu) disabled, apps like zattoo IPTV display a +4db dolby metadata gain on my receiver during audio stream initialization. Don't know how Fire TV can decide that a PCM 2.0 source should of all things be boosted by 4db during encoding into Dolby Digital Plus 2.0 (stereo).

Edit
Audio dropout happens reproducibly every 46:36.219 mm: ss.ms respectively every 2796219 ms when connected to an AVR - no matter which refresh rate and tested on PrimeVideo, Zattoo IPTV, Youtube, netflix not yet tested.
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With so many video settings on both tv stick and and kodi(v18) - what are the optimal settings for smooth playback and audio sync issues? Atm I have default ones where there keep original framerate is off etc... Thanks.

Also is it expected that audio sync delay is not constant even for the same audio type? Some of my AC3 tracks have about 150ms delay and some 300 which is really annoying...
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2018 - Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K3