{"id":1108,"date":"2016-12-04T15:58:40","date_gmt":"2016-12-04T21:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/?p=1108"},"modified":"2016-12-04T15:58:40","modified_gmt":"2016-12-04T21:58:40","slug":"after-2-5-years-the-fire-tv-is-still-an-amazing-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/?p=1108","title":{"rendered":"After 2.5 years the Fire TV is still an amazing device."},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought my first Amazon Fire TV in the summer of 2014, and 2.5 years later I’m still loving this device. In fact, I liked it so much that I moved my whole house over to Fire TVs: living room, bedroom, and a fire stick in the playroom (all 1st gen). These are primarily used for streaming content, e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc, mythtv front-end for over-the-air TV via Kodi, and now video games!<\/p>\n

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Blast from the Past<\/h5>\n

\"20161104_181914\"I’ve had quiet a run w\/ my ~13 year old original, modded Xbox. It’s an impressive piece of hardware, and I’m really glad I bought it. I upgraded the 10GB hard drive with a 120G Seagate IDE (remember those? I can’t believe it spins). Apart from the after market chip & firmware, I added the ability to power it on via the remote, a high-end quiet fan, passive GPU cooling, and insulated the case with cork board to make it quieter. I ran xbmc (pre kodi) on it and it worked really well with mythtv, emulators, DVD player, and of course Halo 1 & 2.
\nIt started showing it’s age when I started recording HD broadcasting with mythtv. The old P3 733 processor just isn’t powerful enough to decode “HD” mpeg2 files. In my experience you need at least a fast p4 or dual core processor to decode HD streams without GPU acceleration. That would have been around 2006. From then on it was just a really fun “vintage” gaming system. I don’t play games that often anymore, but I get to enjoy it 3 or 4 times a year.<\/p>\n

So why decommission it now?
\n1) Audio problems. I have to turn my speakers to 99% just to hear it. Very\u00a0strange.<\/p>\n

2) Network issues. For some reason when the Xbox has\u00a0network access, the system freezes after ~30 seconds. The timing makes it difficult to troubleshoot, and honestly it’s not worth the trouble. I suspect it’s actually related to xbmc, but again, I’m not investing any time here.<\/p>\n

Onward and upward:<\/h5>\n

Earlier this year I received a Raspberry Pi 3 and I was thinking of loading RetroPie on it. That would probably be a great setup as well, but I was looking at the specs and realized it’s very similar to my Fire TV. I’ve read the new Pies make great emulators, but I wanted to see how well the Fire TV would work and further consolidate\u00a0devices. Really all I needed to purchase were some controllers and a little bit of storage. After doing some research I settled on using wireless Xbox 360 controllers because they’re natively supported on the Fire TV. Initially I didn’t realize they required an additional USB receiver (D’uh! they’re not bluetooth), and since the unit only has a single USB port this necessitates getting an inexpensive hub.<\/p>\n

Hardware:<\/p>\n