Roku or Amazon Fire.... (1 Viewer)

[Zztop]

yea, I see the fire stick 4k max on sale for $35 + a possible 20% off with trade in of select Fire TV, Roku, Chromecast, or Apple TV devices

 

[Sailorsaint]

Purchased a Fire Stick from Amazon last week for about $20. Today I get two boxes and I'm wondering why it would take two boxes for a firestick??? Yep, they sent me two...guess I'll hang on to it until they ask for it back.

 

[bigdaddysaints]

I bought a couple Onn Google Streaming boxes from Walmart, they were on sale. $14.99 for the 2K one and 19.99 for the 4K one. I wanted to check them out to see how good they were. They seemed to work very well. But i had one weird issue. I could not get Amazon Prime Video to work on either one. They seemed to work as good as my Nvidia Shield (minus the gaming aspect) and the Tivo Stream i have. And just as good as the Firestick, IMO.
I tried 20 different ways to get Amazon Prime Video to intall and work correctly on it, with no luck.

 

[Sailorsaint]

I bought a couple Onn Google Streaming boxes from Walmart, they were on sale. $14.99 for the 2K one and 19.99 for the 4K one. I wanted to check them out to see how good they were. They seemed to work very well. But i had one weird issue. I could not get Amazon Prime Video to work on either one. They seemed to work as good as my Nvidia Shield (minus the gaming aspect) and the Tivo Stream i have. And just as good as the Firestick, IMO.
I tried 20 different ways to get Amazon Prime Video to intall and work correctly on it, with no luck.

Granted, I've only had the Firestick for a couple hours, but the setup was easy, it gets all my streaming preferences, and the best part....it connects reliably to my network. I'll give it a week and let y'all know how it turns out.

 

[bigdaddysaints]

Amazon did a good job at designing the Firestick. Its easy setup and very user friendly.
I will program Firesticks for people (they call it Jailbreaking, but its not really the correct term) and they are just so easy to use, even with the sideloaded streaming apps.
A few tips, go into your settings and turn off stuff like notifications, also disable Amazon photos, and turn off the screen saver, those two are resourse hogs and will eat up your storage if you don't clear the cache on them periodically.

 

[Zack Lee]

I moved to a Firecube from a Firestick several months ago and I love that sucker. In many ways its the same but having the always on Alexa is really nice for using my music account (it switches automatically no matter what is on the screen) and even more convenient IMO is the fact that I can just tell Alexa to change HDMI ports without searching for my TV remote. And the setup included setting up sound bar controls as well.

 

[Sailorsaint]

It's been 5 days now since getting the Firestick and I'm loving it! I was so tired of turning on my TV and not having an internet connection. Even the wifi extenders I had purchased weren't helping. I knew it had to be the TV wifi that was the problem because my laptop and phone connected flawlessly. Five days with the Firestick and it fires up instantly when I turn on the TV. Great connectivity and easy navigation, glad I got one.

 

[Sailorsaint]

Ok, my bandwidth usage has doubled since installing the FireStick. Does it continue streaming even after I turn it off with the remote? I always make it a point to return it to the "home" page before powering it off, but not sure if that means anything. I know my usage hasn't doubled. Maybe I need to unplug it for a day and see if the data usage goes down.

 

[Swampy Saint]

Ok, my bandwidth usage has doubled since installing the FireStick. Does it continue streaming even after I turn it off with the remote? I always make it a point to return it to the "home" page before powering it off, but not sure if that means anything. I know my usage hasn't doubled. Maybe I need to unplug it for a day and see if the data usage goes down.

I've always wondered that as well.
Hopefully, someone can answer this.

 

[bigdaddysaints]

I've always wondered that as well.
Hopefully, someone can answer this.

I haven't had this issue, but i do make sure my wife and kids understand that when they are done watching, not to simply turn off the TV, because whatever they are watching is still playing, to make sure they at least hit the home button. The Firestick doesn't turn off unless you have it pluggen into the USB port of the TV for power, so if you are watching, say, YouTube TV, it will just continue to stream.
Also, i go in the settings of all mine and turn a bunch of stuff off. In the preferences i turn off all the notifications, auto play on featured content, the screensaver (which is a storage hog for sure) turn off all the stuff like that, disable Amazon Photos, etc.
I don't think any of that is using a ton of data, but its worth a try.
But the biggest thing is make sure you exit out of any streaming apps before you turn your TV off. If not, that could be the problem..

 

[Sailorsaint]

I haven't had this issue, but i do make sure my wife and kids understand that when they are done watching, not to simply turn off the TV, because whatever they are watching is still playing, to make sure they at least hit the home button. The Firestick doesn't turn off unless you have it pluggen into the USB port of the TV for power, so if you are watching, say, YouTube TV, it will just continue to stream.
Also, i go in the settings of all mine and turn a bunch of stuff off. In the preferences i turn off all the notifications, auto play on featured content, the screensaver (which is a storage hog for sure) turn off all the stuff like that, disable Amazon Photos, etc.
I don't think any of that is using a ton of data, but its worth a try.
But the biggest thing is make sure you exit out of any streaming apps before you turn your TV off. If not, that could be the problem..

Ya know, I had initially thought about plugging it into the USB port but I was too lazy to rearrange things because I already had something plugged in there. But, I've rearranged things and now when the TV is without power, so is the FireStick. I'll still return to the Home screen before shutting it off though.

 

[bigdaddysaints]

I am not sure that is the preferred method. I do not know if the Firestick is designed to turn on and off so frequently. You may even get a notice pop up snd say somethig about not a suffenicent power source. I wouldn't just because i am too impatient to have to wait a couple minutes each time I turn on the TV and have to wait for the Firestick to boot up..lol

 

[Sailorsaint]

I am not sure that is the preferred method. I do not know if the Firestick is designed to turn on and off so frequently. You may even get a notice pop up snd say somethig about not a suffenicent power source. I wouldn't just because i am too impatient to have to wait a couple minutes each time I turn on the TV and have to wait for the Firestick to boot up..lol

It's working fine so far. Also, most times before I power off the TV, I change the input to my Tablo, then power it off. After I switched the power around, I turned the TV on, changed the input to FireStick, and it fired right up. I'll probably keep it like this and see if it starts giving me problems, if it does I'll switch them back around.

 

[Zztop]

Ok, my bandwidth usage has doubled since installing the FireStick. Does it continue streaming even after I turn it off with the remote? I always make it a point to return it to the "home" page before powering it off, but not sure if that means anything. I know my usage hasn't doubled. Maybe I need to unplug it for a day and see if the data usage goes down.

change the streaming bitrate to something lower. Might also be called streaming quality or video quality or something similar. You probably have to change this for each app that you use. My understanding is changing it just in the firetv settings would only affect the streaming of amazon prime videos, but won't do anything if say for example you are watching something in the netflix app. I'm think you have to make manual adjustments for each app you use

 

[bigdaddysaints]

I'm pretty sure there is a default setting for that. It's either under preferences >set video quality or under Display > video resolution.
I'm not home to look at it, but it's one of those, maybe both..