{"id":815,"date":"2014-09-30T16:31:17","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T22:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/?p=815"},"modified":"2014-09-30T16:31:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T22:31:39","slug":"mythtv-on-the-amazon-firetv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/?p=815","title":{"rendered":"MythTV on the Amazon FireTV"},"content":{"rendered":"

…..okay so the tile of this should probably be XBMC\/Kodi on the FireTV, but whatever.<\/p>\n

\"firetv\"<\/a>
I love the small footprint<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s been over 10 years since I’ve cut the cable with ….cable\/satellite, and 7 years since I’ve deployed MythTV and ditched Tivo. Disregarding some negligible hardware costs, I’ve been spending about $20 a year on television. Absolutely awesome! About four years ago I started supplementing local broadcasts with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon. This was great from a content and cost perspective, but proved challenging from a Linux\/Flash support perspective. At first the best option was to dual-boot to Windows, but this had extremely low WAF, Wife Acceptance Factor (and even worse OSAF, or open source acceptance factor). About a year ago I picked up some cheap Sony blueray players that supported all the the streaming media capabilities we needed. They’re a great buy and I’d highly recommend these units since they offer a lot for ~$50. The problem this left me with is the fact that I have this old, power hungry, x86 computer next to my televisions, and the percentage has shifted to where we stream 70% of what we watch. I thought about deprecating MythTV, but honestly it’s just too good to ditch. Plus I already have the infrastructure (master backend server and tuners) and we still need something for our movies and broadcast shows.
\n<\/p>\n

Enter the FireTV<\/h3>\n

I’ve looking at low-power ARM based solution for a while now. I almost jumped on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon, but decided that the Amazon FireTV is a better option. At the time of this writing they cost $85, which is pretty close to the price of a Raspberry Pi once you add on the sd card, case, power supply, IR receiver, and remote (not to mention the time required to tweak all of this). Actually it’s a better deal when you consider that the processor and hardware is much more powerful and has a *lot* of polish on it. So the next step is getting XBMC\/Kodi running in a way that is stable that my wife and children will tolerate. Luckily the hardwork has already been done and there’s a great application called adbFire that will simplify most of the steps to tweak the FireTV for XBMC\/Kodi.<\/p>\n

Basically we use the Amazon launcher for any streaming content and start XBMC\/Kodi for any content on our media server, and so far it’s a pretty awesome solution. It can do everything except play DVD or Blueray discs. The downsides are the stability isn’t quite as good as a stand-alone MythTV frontend, and the deinterlacing isn’t as good on the FireTV. ….but the wife hasn’t complained yet, so maybe we’re OK. Anyway, if anyone is looking for a good MythTV\/ARM solution, it’s hard to imagine a better combination. I’ll write a follow-up with some settings I found helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…..okay so the tile of this should probably be XBMC\/Kodi on the FireTV, but whatever. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve cut the cable with ….cable\/satellite, and 7 years since I’ve deployed MythTV and ditched Tivo. Disregarding some negligible hardware costs, I’ve been spending about $20 a year on television. Absolutely awesome! About four … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “MythTV on the Amazon FireTV”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-sourcenerd-stuff","tag-mythtv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1271,"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrguitar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}