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:
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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.
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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?
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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.