Fire TV Stick v2 Questions and Observations

I recently purchased a Quatro tuner at Best Buy and they were giving away a free Fire TV stick, so I figured it would be a good way to test out the DVR service on another platform (I use an Apple TV 4K at home), and give me an easy way to watch live TV and recordings on the road. I do have a few questions and observations:

  1. When playing content away from home this past weekend (live and recorded), I noticed that 1080i channels (CBS, NBC, and PBS) had a mild stuttering / frame dropping when the deinterlace option was checked. It seemed to go away when I unchecked it, but it got me thinking…isn’t that setting irrelevant when watching transcoded streams away from home? It’s my assumption that when a stream is transcoded by Channels DVR on my server at home, it deinterlaces the 1080i content in addition to reducing the bit rate. I tried the same stream at various bit rates and resolutions (1080p 8mbps, 720p 4mbps, etc) but the mild stuttering persisted. I never got any interlacing artifacts when the setting was unchecked, which is what leads me to believe deinterlacing occurs before a stream is sent out to a remote client. I realize the Fire TV stick v2 is the slowest of all the supported platforms, but is there any reason this setting would cause a mild stuttering at home or remotely? I ruled out bandwidth where I was streaming remotely from since I had full wifi signal strength and 100mbps down internet speed. My upload speeds at home where my Channels DVR server is located is a solid 20mbps, so that shouldn’t be an issue either. I also noticed no mild stuttering issues on the same live/recorded streams when using my iPad remotely.

  2. I could not get the surround sound option to work remotely. I would get a loud clicking noise, and had to uncheck the surround sound option in the settings to get usable audio. I also changed the settings on the Fire TV stick itself from DD+ over HDMI to DD over HDMI, but that had no effect on the loud clicking noise. I figured it was just an issue with the low end TV I was using, but I briefly tried it at home on my higher end plasma TV, and I still got the same loud clicking noise until I unchecked the surround sound option in Channels. Any thoughts on why this is happening?

  3. I noticed on the info screen that it had Gracenote as the guide provider on the Fire TV stick, but at home on my Apple TV 4K it uses Silicon Dust as the guide provider. Is this user selectable, or does the Fire TV platform only pull guide data from Gracenote for some reason? I also assumed that the guide data is being pulled directly from the Channels DVR server, so does this mean the server only pulls from Gracenote and not Silicon Dust? I noticed no impact on usability, but was just curious about how and where a client retrieves guide data.

None of this is a deal breaker for me, but it would be nice to have a small, portable piece of hardware to plug into a TV when on the road, and the Fire TV stick v2 seems to be the smallest supported hardware option. I may consider selling it and buying the Fire TV 3 pendant if that would resolve minor playback issues, but if the issues I’m having are user error or things that can be addressed in future software releases, I’d like to just stick with the…uh…stick, lol.

Hi,

The FTV2 stick is one of the worst streaming devices available on the market. The mpeg2 hardware decoder on that device does not deinterlace at all, producing terrible picture quality on 1080i channels. SD has known about this issue for years, and frankly I’m shocked they’re giving away these devices when they know they’re not suitable for OTA broadcasts.

If your goal is to use it as a remote streaming device, then your best bet is to turn off Deinterlacing in the app. You’re correct that the DVR server will deinterlace for you before sending the stream over the internet. We attempted to add a GPU based deinterlacer to compensate for the lacking decoder, but even the GPU is underpowered and that’s why you notice the occasional stuttering. With Deinterlacing off in the app, a different video rendering method is used which is more performant on the stick.

The surround sound implementation on the FTV2 stick is also finicky, since it runs a really old fork of Android TV from before dolby was officially supported. When you hear clicking its usually because the device is sending dolby out but the TV/speakers don’t recognize its dolby and are trying to play it as regular audio. I’m curious if you notice the same issue at-home or if its only happening with remote streaming?

Guide data comes from the DVR server, which loads data from Gracenote. SiliconDust’s data is also powered by Gracenote (it didn’t used to be), so there’s no practical difference between the two anymore.

The FTV3 (pendant) is a much better device, and features a built-in hardware deinterlacer. It’s only a little bigger than the FTV stick, and it’s what I use myself when traveling.

Thanks for the detailed reply! This type of developer interaction is why I consider supporting Channels DVR money well spent.

I agree about the FTV2 stick being a poor streaming device, which is probably why they are basically giving them away now.

When I turned deinterlacing off in the app, the video quality was acceptable, and there were no apparent dropped frames compared to when I had it turned on. I find it interesting that turning it on would cause dropped frames when streaming remotely since deinterlacing is done before the stream is sent out, and therefore not dependent on the underpowered GPU.

To answer your question about surround sound not working, it happened both remotely and at home, so it seems to be entirely the FTV2 stick’s fault. I can’t foresee a scenario where I could even take advantage of surround sound when on the road, so this isn’t really a deal breaker.

Since I’m only using this for remote streaming, I’ll just keep using it for now since it was essentially free, but if this were my only streaming device, it would be unacceptable. I might wait on another Amazon fire sale on the FTV3 and “gift” this to a friend or relative since you have confirmed that the FTV3 is a much more capable device.

Thanks again for the quick reply, and keep up the good work! My Apple TV 4K works flawlessly at home where it really counts!

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Yea it’s silly that turning on deinterlacing affects playback performance of progressive video, but it’s not something that’s easily fixable unfortunately.

I don’t think it’s SD that’s doing that, but Best Buy. It’s some kind of special they’re running. ICBW.

SD is advertising it all over the place without any disclaimers:

Huh. Not particularly responsible of them :frowning:

So what’s new? Snarky on my part for review of SD, but it’s in my nature…said the scorpion.

So this is slightly off topic, but since I started this thread in the first place, I figured I’d share my experience on getting Channels to work with the FTV1 stick I had lying around and haven’t used in a year :open_mouth:

The short answer is it works with a couple of caveats:

  1. Using the native MPEG2 streams, all 1080i channels played with no dropped frames but with interlacing artifacts since there is no deinterlacing support. Surprisingly, the 1080p 8mbps transcoding option appeared to drop about half of the frames, and the audio was out of sync with the video, which made it completely unwatchable. The one that did the trick was 720p 6mbps transcoding, which played smoothly for all 1080i channels. The 720p channels played flawlessly using the native MPEG2 streams and the 720p 6mbps transcoding. I didn’t check to see if 1080p transcoding worked since it didn’t work with the 1080i channels.

  2. There is no surround sound support. Just like with deinterlacing, there isn’t even a checkbox to enable / disable it.

So for anyone out there with a FTV1 stick they have sitting in a drawer like I did, it CAN be used with Channels DVR if you’re okay with 720p transcoding and no surround sound. If you can overlook the slow, laggy interface of this underpowered streaming stick, it seems like an okay option for a smaller guest room TV or for using it on the road.

Overall, the Fire Sticks just aren’t great for your at home setup. They’re just incredibly underpowered. Amazon has actually shipped slower devices on each iteration.

Because most of our streams are MPEG2, it’s just not a great device for viewing original quality.

BUT! They’re great devices for travel. With their captive portal support for hotel WiFi, the fact that they play h.264 just fine with your server doing all the deinterlacing, and their cheap price, they’re a great solution for hotels or other kind of travel.

To me, they fit well there. If you’re serious about Channels and HDHomeRun as your primary TV setup at home, you should consider an Android TV or Apple TV.

They’re also great for secondary TVs that you don’t watch a lot of TV like say the garage or porch TVs. You can also just bite the bullet and set a lower quality for home viewing and rely on transcoding to get a smooth stream.

Or FTV v2, if you can get one. Particularly if you want to get DD out of DD+ on Netflix or Amazon Prime: Only ATV and FTV handle DD properly.

I ran some tests here, and the Surround Sound setting is working with the FTV2 stick on my TV. I tried with streaming quality set to Original, 720@6mbps and 720@4mbps. (At 6mbps at above, the DVR transcoder sends the raw ac3 stream, and below that it sends a stereo aac stream instead.) All played back correctly for me with the Surround Sound option enabled.

I’m surprised that your high end plasma wouldn’t recognize the dolby stream, but I guess that’s what’s happening. I’ve experienced the same clicking issue with the FTV2stick, but only on a really low-end budget TV (Westinghouse branded) at my parents’ house.

The FTV1stick can’t do 1080 at 60fps, which is why you’re seeing problems there. And as you mentioned, we haven’t even tried to get surround sound or deinterlacing working on that model since its so old and so underpowered.