Roku or ChromeCast or Amazon Fire TV stick

BoardsMember

Hi. Want to make an informed decision on which of the above to get, and I'm not at all sure sure having read a good bit about the various options.

I have two non-smart televisions in the house, both on UPC/Virgin, both have spare HDMI and power sockets, one is beside the router, other is at a location with access to the wireless network in the house.

Santa is bringing an xbox one for the kids, we also have a western digital that is wired to one of the televisions, it has onboard storage, it doesn't stream or anything. Just to give you the full picture.

I downloaded Kodi onto my android phone, and installed a windows version onto my windows pc. Both working well.

Now I want to be able to mirror content from either my phone or laptop onto the televisions. From the laptop it would be nice to be able to mirror content I have on the laptop, not just content coming through Kodi.

So which stick should I use?

Or should I look at android boxes instead of one of the sticks for mirroring?

If the boxes are going to be vastly superior to the mirroring approach I think I would prefer to go that route.

Can kodi repos like The Beast be installed on xbox one?

Sorry for all the newbie questions. Thanks for reading

CantGetNoSleep

Kodi can be sideloaded directly on the Amazon Fire stick so this could be a better option than trying to cast it.

BoardsMember

CantGetNoSleep wrote: »

Kodi can be sideloaded directly on the Amazon Fire stick so this could be a better option than trying to cast it.

Thanks for the reply. Sounds like a good idea.

Tigerandahalf

Can someone tell me which of these I could get to stream the odd match.
I have a tiny 15GB data allowance on a mifi dongle.
Does one of these double the amount of data you use?

Do they mirror or download the data a 2nd time of the match I would be watching?


Thanks

LandonRicketts

Going to get a Fire TV Stick for the parents. I see amazon UK won't post them to Ireland. I suppose parcel motel would be the best bet to get it delivered to here?

GY A1

whats wifi like on the fire stick

beardybrewer

GY A1 wrote: »

whats wifi like on the fire stick

That would be my big problem with it too. I think the full Fire box might be better to have a wired connection. But can you sideload Kodi on them and place an icon on the main menu along with Netflix? That would make it pretty tempting.

Googling lead me to this, you can sideload: http://www.htpcbeginner.com/install-kodi-on-amazon-fire-tv/

However, getting the shortcut on the latest version only work with caveats: http://www.htpcbeginner.com/kodi-shortcut-on-amazon-fire-tv/

Ste-

Install firestarter on any amazon fire tv and make your own app menu. I dont use the fire tv homescreen anymore.

http://www.aftvnews.com/firestarter-is-a-non-root-launcher-replacement-with-fantastic-home-button-detection/

Remouad

Ste- wrote: »

Install firestarter on any amazon fire tv and make your own app menu. I dont use the fire tv homescreen anymore.

http://www.aftvnews.com/firestarter-is-a-non-root-launcher-replacement-with-fantastic-home-button-detection/

This is what decided me on buying one.

Fire TV is currently discounted to £64.99 until the 9th

jonski

Anyone thinking of going with the Fire TV should know that it doesn't support NTFS, only FAT32 .

Remouad

jonski wrote: »

Anyone thinking of going with the Fire TV should know that it doesn't support NTFS, only FAT32 .

just got delivery of my fire tv yesterday and have discovered the first major flaw.
Kodi doesn't seem to be able to see smb shares.

From the little bit of research I've done looks like it's kodi 15 that has the issue so I'm going to try 14.2 tonight and see how that goes.

The UI transitions are also slow but I'm hoping this is also down to the network issue.

Remouad

Remouad wrote: »

just got delivery of my fire tv yesterday and have discovered the first major flaw.
Kodi doesn't seem to be able to see smb shares.

From the little bit of research I've done looks like it's kodi 15 that has the issue so I'm going to try 14.2 tonight and see how that goes.

The UI transitions are also slow but I'm hoping this is also down to the network issue.

smb shares sorted. Had to reboot server.

UI transitions and start up are slow. Seems to be around operations that connect to the mysql DB as browsing the settings menu is nice and fast.

jonski

Remouad wrote: »

smb shares sorted. Had to reboot server.

I sorted my HD problem as well , I turned a raspberry pi that I had sitting here into a file server and attached the 3TB HD to that .