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selfcontained · 2024-01-02, 19:21

A request for owners of the 3rd-generation Amazon Fire TV Cube

Can someone please confirm the following conditions as to whether Kodi can play:

videos from a USB 2.0 Type-A connected external (NOT "adopted" or "expanded" storage) NTFS-formatted spinning-platters HDD (the larger the better - I know 32-bit Android tops out at 16.3TB addressability)
that is NOT powered by the Cube's USB port but through a wall/mains socket?
Bonus points if Kodi can write to it as well.

I ask because I can't afford to buy and try. After days of Googling, I've been unable to get a consistent, definite answer to that. The answers I've seen are of one or two of the above stated criteria. I've received some good info here and I thank you - but I'd like to get a definitive answer.

In a nutshell, I'd like to know if Kodi can play a remuxed UHD Blu video (so larger than 4GB) stored on a wall-powered external NTFS-formatted 8TB HDD plugged directly into a 3rd-generation Fire TV Cube - bonus points if it can also write to this NTFS-formatted HDD.

If one of you fine folks could test these criteria I'd be forever grateful. Thanks in advance.

izprtxqkft · 2024-01-03, 00:40

looks like firetv cube gen3 will in fact read an external ntfs drive

/dev/block/vold/public:8,1 on /mnt/media_rw/******* type ntfs (ro,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,uid=1023,gid=1023,umask=00,nls=utf8,errors=continue,mft_zone_multiplier=1)

SEAGATE STKP16000402 enclosure that used to house a 16TB (but it got shucked) which is externally powered
Now has a Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 8TB in it
formatted from Windows Server 2022 as an NTFS "Basic Data Partition"

it shows up as a media source in kodi, it can see it/open it

but as you can see from the mount above, FireOS has mounted it "RO" which means no write for anything

i will try to copy a movie to it on another machine later to see if it will even play something, it's a fresh format because i usually use EXT

also to note it is plugged in via my usb hub+ethernet adapter combo to the firetv

selfcontained · 2024-01-03, 01:29

That's so awesome @izprtxqkft - thank you so much! My use case would be using a wall-powered 18TB HDD so this is real close to how I'd be using it.

If the Cube is unable to write to the drive I'm not sure how Kodi would write metadata from scrapers or write logs (I'd like to avoid clogging up the 16GB eMMC)

izprtxqkft

(2024-01-03, 01:29)selfcontained Wrote: If the Cube is unable to write to the drive I'm not sure how Kodi would write metadata from scrapers or write logs (I'd like to avoid clogging up the 16GB eMMC)

i suspect it's because it's NTFS which belongs to microsoft or some such
i only had a short amount of time available to test this after i tracked down the case and a drive i wasn't using
i would like to check some other filesystems since when i first tried this nothing worked or did anything at all (Oct/Nov 2022)
possibly EXT4, ExFat or a GPT NTFS
it will be tomorrow before i have time again

as far as filling up the emmc, you can still use a "cache" usb thumb drive in concert with an external and use path substitution for the thumbnails, not ideal but in a pinch it would do
really ive never come close to filling up the emmc, i set artwork levels in advanced settings as 720p posters and 9999 fanart, most ive seen is 2GB used

----
last note, the usb hub i am using is the cheapest usb hub/ethernet combo i could find at the time - https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0871ZHCKK

selfcontained · 2024-01-03, 01:45

Those are good tips - thanks. Yeah, one of the many fragmented things I read about NTFS with the 3rd-gen Cube is that it didn't work in the initial firmware version. Many reviewers at the time concluded (rightly) that NTFS didn't work. It was a firmware update a week or so later that enabled NTFS - but by then, many reviewers had moved on and other articles on the Cube just copied those initial reports and never retested.

izprtxqkft

neither exfat nor ext4 work resulting in FireTV prompting "Unsupported Format" with a request to format it
allowing FireOS to format it results in an undersized "fat32" partition of 1.2TB not the full 8TB (~7.5) of the drive

this format is mounted rw to the system, however, kodi can see it but cannot write to it so not better than the initial ro mounted ntfs

re-evaluated what i had done yesterday, it was already a GPT disk as MBR has a maximum size of 2TB so it just shows how i'm not a windows user

re-formatted same as i had done yesterday, ntfs from windows, this time on windows i changed the security properties on the drive to allow "Full Control" from Everyone (and every user listed)

/dev/block/vold/public:8,2 on /mnt/media_rw/********** type ntfs (rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,uid=1023,gid=1023,umask=00,nls=utf8,errors=continue,mft_zone_multiplier=1)

now the drive mounts as rw but still doesn't allow anything to be written to it from either kodi or adb

i suppose if you want to load everything onto a drive beforehand and never manage it from android then this will work fine

-----

last thing i wanted to check was if perhaps 2 partitions could be used, a smaller fat32 that kodi could use for it's profile or at least thumbnails plus a larger storage partition for media
i created a 32GB fat32 and formatted the remaining 7+TB as ntfs, the firetv will mount and see both partitions but results in permission denied errors on the fat32 same as ntfs

there is perhaps some combination that can be used that i am not seeing

at this point im done with this testing, it's pretty clear that fireos or android does not like this and it will still be better to use a network file server, even if that server is just a router with a usb port and an smb server

reported filesystems in /proc/filesystems

bonus, i expected something to work here so i tested the emmc speeds in advance expecting to be able to compare them with external storage
so here are those results

using dd if=/dev/urandom, 1GB for write speed tests
transferred back to /dev/null with dd of=/dev/null for read speed tests

internal eMMC write speed
1048576000 bytes transferred in 17.175 secs (61052459 bytes/sec)
or 58.2MB/s or 488Mbps

internal eMMC read speed
1048576000 bytes transferred in 11.192 secs (93689778 bytes/sec)
or 89.3MB/s or 749Mbps

selfcontained · 2024-01-03, 19:20

Wow that's great! Thank you very much for your thorough testing - most appreciated.

My use case for this is my 82 year old Dad who knows nothing about computers, doesn't have internet, and is many miles away from me (so I wouldn't be able to fix any storage+SMB-server problems.) I will fill up a wall-powered hard disk with his favorites, configure the Cube, scrape metadata, and give it to my sister to bring to my Dad when she next visits. In fact, this is pretty much what I've done for a few remote relatives. When they visit they know to bring their "Kodi box" and ext. HDD for me to refresh content and update/firmware/apps/configs, etc. So I'm just adding my Dad to this remotely deployed self contained (hence my username) setup.

izprtxqkft · 2024-01-03, 20:25

you're welcome