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RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - jocala - 2014-05-22

(2014-05-22, 03:20)sunrise495 Wrote: Newbie question #2 - Alternative keymaps for Fire TV remote

"Cut and paste the following into a new text document and save as keyboard.xml and place in userdata/keymaps/"

How am I dong this from a mac, or pc?

Thanks

Use the internal file manager in xbmc. It's a simple two-pane interface. Right click a file to move/copy/delete etc.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - CuriousG - 2014-05-22

What's the general consensus in which version of Gotham to use? The final release, beta1, beta2, nightlies? I also noticed the link in the wiki page for beta2 points to the x86 version not ARM.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - jocala - 2014-05-22

(2014-05-22, 08:40)CuriousG Wrote: What's the general consensus in which version of Gotham to use? The final release, beta1, beta2, nightlies? I also noticed the link in the wiki page for beta2 points to the x86 version not ARM.

My vote is for Gotham stable.

(wiki link for beta2 fixed.)


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - hdmkv - 2014-05-22

I just upgraded to Beta 2 from stable, and it's working just as well.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - sont77 - 2014-05-22

Alpha or Gotham 13.0HuhHuh?


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - voip-ninja - 2014-05-22

(2014-05-22, 18:44)sont77 Wrote: Alpha or Gotham 13.0HuhHuh?

Seeing as the announcement is on the front page of xbmc.org that Beta 2 for Gotham is out I think it is pretty evident he is referring to Gotham Beta 2, as there is no Beta 2 for anything else right now.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - kalikid021 - 2014-05-22

(2014-05-14, 18:35)kalikid021 Wrote:
(2014-05-09, 22:05)kalikid021 Wrote: After switching to Gotham from Frodo, I am seeing audio delay issues, and it's not of the kind in which I can set a global audio sync change. Some videos are need adjustment to the negative direction, and others to the positive direction. Another thing I have noticed is that I have no ability to make settings changes to hardware/software decoding, or codec. The settings are greyed out, in both versions.

Any advice?

Anybody?


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - drew_willy - 2014-05-22

(2014-05-20, 04:21)voip-ninja Wrote:
(2014-05-20, 03:00)drew_willy Wrote: I apologize if this has been explained previously in the thread. I attempted to search for it, but that wasn't very helpful. Plus, I am not well-versed in video and audio containers and codecs, generally. I did find this: https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/devices/fire-tv/docs/media-specifications#Supported Media Formats

What kinds of file formats (codecs, containers, etc.) can I expect to be able to play on the Amazon Fire TV through XBMC? A lot of my media is h.264 in .mkv container (according to the info shown in XBMC and the file extension shown in windows; I know nothing about codecs and containers).

At first, I would have assumed that any file that plays fine in XBMC on my i3 HTPC would play fine on the Fire TV, but then I recall seeing several posts about a lack of MKV support, so that left me unsure, as I believe XBMC on my HTPC plays MKV files just fine. Of course, I have to admit that over the years I have not been the best at keeping track of which codecs / containers, etc. I use for my media. So far, in my experience, running XBMC on two Intel machines I have never had a problem playing back any files whatsoever, no matter the video or audio formats, so I never paid too close attention to them.

I am really interested in getting a Fire TV, but I would hate to have to re-encode or remux a couple hundred files. Any info / summary you could give to fill me in? Thanks.

FTV works with H.264 via hardware decoding. Some full bit rate MKV files have shown problems but if the file is compressed or a different container is used they play fine. . DTS-MA and True-HD don't work but with DTS-MA it will extract core DTS track, with True-HD you will get stereo.

VC-1 is not supported in hardware and about 25% of Blu-Rays are in VC1 format. FTV does not have enough horsepower to decode VC1 or high resolution MPEG-2 via the CPU.

FTV is a very good box if you have a library consisting primarily of compressed H264 content without HD audio. Also, FTV will not do 23.976 video so not really suitable for a home theater setup...


Thank you very much. This helps greatly.

I guess that leaves me with another question regarding audio specifically. You have said that HD audio does not work "but with DTS-MA it will extract core DTS track, with True-HD you will get stereo." I am not at all well-versed with HD audio formats or serious receiver/speaker setups (I still think 5.1 surround sound in itself is amazing). Suppose I have a 2.1 soundbar to which I connect the Fire TV via HDMI. I have previously had no trouble getting the soundbar to play audio from files containing DTS and Dolby Digital audio. Will I be able to get 2.1 audio when XBMC on the Fire TV attempts to play a video with DTS-MA or True-HD audio? From what you've written above, I think the answer is yes, but I am not sure. Also, seeing that my HTPC plays the same file in XBMC just fine, producing audio via 3.5mm aux line to 2.1 computer speakers*, I strongly suspect the audio will play fine on the soundbar via HDMI, but just checking with somebody who obviously knows a lot more about all the audio stuff than I do.


*I know, my audio setup is super lame, but it is all I can afford now; it works at present. Later in the year, when my budget allows, I would like to step up my 2.1 computer speaker setup to a true 5.1 setup. But getting info on that would probably require a whole other thread...


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - hdmkv - 2014-05-22

(2014-05-22, 19:14)voip-ninja Wrote:
(2014-05-22, 18:44)sont77 Wrote: Alpha or Gotham 13.0HuhHuh?

Seeing as the announcement is on the front page of xbmc.org that Beta 2 for Gotham is out I think it is pretty evident he is referring to Gotham Beta 2, as there is no Beta 2 for anything else right now.
Correct Smile.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - Doug in Calgary - 2014-05-22

I got XBMC running on the Fire TV. How do I make it build a library? The media files are on a QNAP NAS on the same network as the Fire TV, all connected via wired Ethernet. I've been able to navigate the directory structures on the NAS from XBMC using the NAS' UPnP server or through SMB. I would like XBMC to scan the directories and build a library.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - queonda - 2014-05-23

Does the voice function work from the firetv remote through XBMC?


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - jocala - 2014-05-23

(2014-05-22, 23:55)Doug in Calgary Wrote: I got XBMC running on the Fire TV. How do I make it build a library? The media files are on a QNAP NAS on the same network as the Fire TV, all connected via wired Ethernet. I've been able to navigate the directory structures on the NAS from XBMC using the NAS' UPnP server or through SMB. I would like XBMC to scan the directories and build a library.

Best asked here: http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=111

(2014-05-23, 00:15)queonda Wrote: Does the voice function work from the firetv remote through XBMC?


No.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - mediumdry - 2014-05-23

I just set up my Fire TV and it's almost perfect for me... there are only a few niggles, some to do with XBMC, some with the Fire TV.
First, volume doesn't work. It's known, but I wish it was fixed already. Does anyone know what needs to be done to get this working? I remember a similar issue being there for the Apple TV 2, maybe the same fix can be worked on? Oddly enough, the amplification does work, so we can make the sound louder, just not less loud.
Also, I'd like to know if the home button and the microphone button can be caught.. I am one button short of having all my most used features working and I'd rather not change the forward/back buttons next to the play/pause button.

Every once in a while there's a crash, but it's rare. The plugins I've tried all work. I've upgraded to 13.1beta2 now and it's all good. The device is just so responsive after using a raspberry pi for a while now. I've had to resort to NFS shares, as my file server is OS X Mountain Lion and both SMB and AFP gave trouble/didn't work in XBMC. (on the raspbmc install I simply mounted the share in the filesystem) Advantage of NFS is that things load a lot faster.

As soon as the volume issue is fixed I'll move over, especially since my wife loves the style of the remote. Smile

edit: I forgot.. the Fire TV does not allow all timezones, only the ones in which it is sold. I live in the Netherlands, so I cannot set my correct timezone, which means that the time is off by at least 6 hours. XBMC doesn't allow to set a separate timezone unfortunately, so I'm stuck with the wrong time. Any ideas to solve it?


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - underworld123 - 2014-05-23

(2014-05-22, 23:55)Doug in Calgary Wrote: I got XBMC running on the Fire TV. How do I make it build a library? The media files are on a QNAP NAS on the same network as the Fire TV, all connected via wired Ethernet. I've been able to navigate the directory structures on the NAS from XBMC using the NAS' UPnP server or through SMB. I would like XBMC to scan the directories and build a library.

Just add your NAS folders as Video Sources.


RE: Amazon Fire TV for XBMC - CuriousG - 2014-05-23

(2014-05-22, 23:55)Doug in Calgary Wrote: I got XBMC running on the Fire TV. How do I make it build a library? The media files are on a QNAP NAS on the same network as the Fire TV, all connected via wired Ethernet. I've been able to navigate the directory structures on the NAS from XBMC using the NAS' UPnP server or through SMB. I would like XBMC to scan the directories and build a library.

If you add uPnP sources, it doesn't prompt to scrape movies or TV shows. At least that's what happened for me when I tried to add my uPnP Universal Media Server source. Once I made the media SMB shares, it would prompt for the scraping type.