2014-04-04, 19:50
I am happy with this setup so far. I bought this because I am looking for a more of a multi-choice solution. Hulu, Netflix, etc seem to run great on this (as it should by design). Gotham Beta3 had issues for me yesterday (greenscreen). I switched to Frodo, and it seems to run great for me. Here are a few things I have noticed:
- If you have XBMC set to scan on startup it seems to look like its scanning but goes nowhere. I have 2400 Feature length videos, and several thousand more 30-60min videos. It seemed to get up to 1844 Feature length in the scan but couldn't go further. Turned off scan at start up, initiated scan through UI and it finished adding the rest of the collection.
- The remote seems to be unable to focus the portion of the on-screen keyboard in order to type things in (as far as I tried). Luckily you can enable remote control from other apps. I have Yatse and was able to use it for all functions including keyboard input.
- If you have a large library like I do, you may end up filling up the storage space on the device. At 1844 of 2400 videos added I had consumed close to 2GB of the on-board storage.
- Until XBMC is added and approved as an app in amazon, you will have to launch it from the Settings > Applications menu. However sideloading the app was straight forward and easy.
- I will have to do some more observational testing to confirm this but I may have had 2 events happen lastnight. First may have been a crash, after leaving it for a few hours to scan my collection I came back and the app was closed and needed to be restarted. I don't know yet if this was due to scan/memory/unknown issue, I will have to look deeper. The second anomaly happened while watching a second movie in XBMC after watching one previous. Sometime towards the end of the second movie, the FireTV screensaver came on (picture slideshow similar to chromecast). I will need to Start some long vids and see how long till this happens again.
All in all I am pleased, and will buy a second one for my bedroom. I want a device that my wife can use reliably to watch a wide array of streaming sources without complication or fuss, as well as myself. I work in the tech industry so it's not such a big deal for me to fiddle a bit to get different sources, but having the ability to do it easily is awesome.
Ask any questions, and I will try to answer them.
- If you have XBMC set to scan on startup it seems to look like its scanning but goes nowhere. I have 2400 Feature length videos, and several thousand more 30-60min videos. It seemed to get up to 1844 Feature length in the scan but couldn't go further. Turned off scan at start up, initiated scan through UI and it finished adding the rest of the collection.
- The remote seems to be unable to focus the portion of the on-screen keyboard in order to type things in (as far as I tried). Luckily you can enable remote control from other apps. I have Yatse and was able to use it for all functions including keyboard input.
- If you have a large library like I do, you may end up filling up the storage space on the device. At 1844 of 2400 videos added I had consumed close to 2GB of the on-board storage.
- Until XBMC is added and approved as an app in amazon, you will have to launch it from the Settings > Applications menu. However sideloading the app was straight forward and easy.
- I will have to do some more observational testing to confirm this but I may have had 2 events happen lastnight. First may have been a crash, after leaving it for a few hours to scan my collection I came back and the app was closed and needed to be restarted. I don't know yet if this was due to scan/memory/unknown issue, I will have to look deeper. The second anomaly happened while watching a second movie in XBMC after watching one previous. Sometime towards the end of the second movie, the FireTV screensaver came on (picture slideshow similar to chromecast). I will need to Start some long vids and see how long till this happens again.
All in all I am pleased, and will buy a second one for my bedroom. I want a device that my wife can use reliably to watch a wide array of streaming sources without complication or fuss, as well as myself. I work in the tech industry so it's not such a big deal for me to fiddle a bit to get different sources, but having the ability to do it easily is awesome.
Ask any questions, and I will try to answer them.
