After much faffing about I finally managed to side-load Kodi on the Fire TV Stick (couldn't get it to show in the list of apps but eventually managed it); however, other Play Store apps are a bit more problematic, as you have to choose an old version that's compatible with Fire OS 5, which is not an easy task. One solution is to unistall updates to the apps (if they are old timers), but I have yet to find a means to achieve that.
I wanted to use Dropbox as a media server for music, videos and photos with Plex on the Fire Stick, but it's clunky and slow, plus you have to pay a monthly subscription to use Plex as a Cloud Server (or a large one-time fee of nearly £100). Investing in a physical media server is a much better idea.
Discovered a handy app called Apps2Fire, which effects the sideload of Google apps very easily from your phone. The problem is that it chooses the apps to install from your phone app list, which will be the most recent versions and thus not guaranteed to work on Fire OS.
All-in-all I'm pleased with the Fire Stick and doing voice searches is far simpler and faster than using a standard Amazon screen-based keyboard. Added to that, if a voice input is not facilitated, the ability to use of your mobile's keyboard as an input device through an app is a boon.
Won't bore you any further with technical analyses.
3 comments:
Sounds like progress! I went for a QNAP NAS w/PLEX server myself as most devices (i.e. Xbox/TV/PC/Tablets etc.) have a PLEX client, seems to work well for movies, not tried music.
Sounds like a good idea. I want to divest myself of Dropbox and have a server in my house that I can connect with when travelling to update the data on my Galaxy S8 PLus. I assume that's possible with the QNAP NAS w/PLEX?
Yep - you can connect from anywhere via a browser using a secure gateway/proxy that they (QNAP) provide. Seems to work well (obviously sufficient local band-width is key if you're streaming stuff) - you can also simply download a movie file from your NAS to a local device if streaming is too demanding.
QNAP gear runs all kinds of other useful (geeky) stuff too, photo/file sharing etc.; I hear that their main competitor, Synology is supposed to be v.good too.
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