I wonder if the Vega stuff will be much better. There's really nothing to like about the Fire TV sticks.
I bought the 4K Max thinking it might be the best option for 4K streaming from all of the major providers as an upgrade for my aging Mi Box (3, I think); aside from the home screen being majority advert, the AV sync is constantly out and differs per-app, so changing it for one makes another worse, WiFi signal is poor and the whole thing is only "acceptable" performance wise.
I suppose Amazon is subsidising the pricing, the the advert laden home screen is a given, but AV sync when it's plugged directly into the HDMI port on the TV is appalling. The Prime Video app on it is disgracefully slow to input and browser, but in that department I find Netflix is really the only app that does perform well on the various TV devices I've tried.
At one point, I thought I wanted an Android TV box, but I realise now that I really don't care so long has it has all of the major streaming apps and performs well (a half decent remote is a must too).
Apparently the only redeeming quality for FireTV Sticks is the ease of piracy. Easily flashed with Kodi or whatever with all the pirate streams pre-configured. I had a FireTV Stick once and never again, their OS is some franken-android monstrosity.
I had kind of hoped when I bought it, that I could put a better launcher on it without the almost-full-screen ads, which aren't always appropriate in a home with children, but they've blocked the ability to change the default launcher; there are ways to have one launch after a short delay, but that just annoys the missus and confuses the kids when it launches just after they've started scrolling around the stock launcher.
There's currently a exploit which allows for system user access. This allows disabling core FireOS features like forced updates (which intentionally break custom launchers) and also allows setting a custom launcher. It's simple and can be done with just an Android phone (or ADB).
I've set Projectivy as my launcher and now it starts directly instead of the ad-ridden Amazon launcher.
They're a bit overpriced, but I've been exceedingly happy with Shield TV (Pro) boxes since they first came out... all the major streaming services are supported with full res as well as Kodi for lan and most other apps direct or side loaded.
I'm able to playback H.265 and AV1 video content at 4k@60 without any issues.
I'm not a software engineer, but it simply blows my mind how shitty most of the streaming apps are. Is it really that hard to serve videos? How is Netflix so good at it? I guess apple tv is pretty snappy too. Surely there's not some deep hidden technical secret that others can't figure out, at least these days. I know back in the day auto-scaling and such was high tech, but isn't it standard technology now? Is it simply that they don't want to spend money to get good engineers? Poor management? It seems like serving videos to people smoothly should be a solved problem. And that's not even the only thing they suck at, the navigation within the apps suck. Or fast-forward/rewind functionality - some of them only have one speed or can only increment 30 seconds at a time. Or why can't I reset a show easily if I want to rewatch it? These are all doable things.
Ignoring the missing functionality, I can see one possibility being that the TV's built in computer is just too weak to process video? Would I better off buying a mini-PC to run all of the services off of?
But what seems like the most obvious explanation is that they know they can get by with it because they have exclusive rights to whatever show you're trying to watch.
I own multiple FireTVs, Google’s Android TV, and an Apple TV and for almost everything I do the AppleTV is far ahead.
The only thing the FireTV had as an edge was the Xbox game streaming app which worked fine over WiFi6E. Otherwise it was absolutely ad-ridden, poor UI/UX, and Amazon’s apps suck on any platform. Since I no longer use the Xbox stuff, the stick and the older versions I have line the bottom of some drawer.
The Android TV turned out be almost as ad ridden as the Fire Stick and no obvious outstanding features. Works ok though. I wanted it to sideload some TV apps from another country to stream those TV channels. But the Android apks didn’t behave well on Android TV so into the drawer it went.
The AppleTV can’t run those apps either, they’re not in the store but at least it’s not showing ads and the UI/UX and performance are top notch. Integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem really brings value to me. And that brings me to probably the most important point.
In the end what matters more is what ecosystem you are or want to be in. Unless you have a super specific requirement or ecosystem preference then generally I’d rank them Apple TV > Android TV > Fire Stick. Amazon doesn’t have an ecosystem to speak of so it hard to take it as a serious competitor to Google and Apple.
The delta in power between Apple TVs and most other streaming boxes/dongles is absurd. Even the now ancient 2017 Apple TV 4K has the muscle to brute force decode a lot of video that isn’t natively hardware accelerated, meanwhile there’s piles of brand new boxes/dongles that are hopelessly weak and don’t have a prayer of being able to handle the same files. The gap is more like a canyon if comparing against the current Apple TV model, and the upcoming refresh is probably going to make it basically a Mac Nano in terms of horsepower.
Yes they’re more pricey, but you’re getting a lot more hardware and better longevity for that money.
It's incredible how consistently bad Set Top Box (and now some embedded-in-tv) products have been, going all the way back to the 90s. It's like every one of these STB manufacturers follows the same playbook: 1. Cut hardware performance down to the absolute bare minimum required to decode some insufficiently selected, average quality video. 2. Make interaction with a remote control as laggy and painful as possible, while also providing stupid [company specific] buttons on the remote that nobody uses. 3. Have no consistent design language or apparent UX research for the software's on-screen GUI, using misaligned clipart images and fixed-width shit-tier fonts for text. I used to even develop these boxes back in the day, and they've always been neglected engineering-wise, built by the lowest bidder so they are as cheap and fragile as humanly possible.
To make matters worse, the old style set top boxes didn't even have any power management, making them electricity hogs and space heaters despite being so pathetically weak. At least the modern ARM/Android borderline-manufactured-ewaste-TV-product can idle with reasonably low power usage, but the bar is so low it's underground.
You don't need to be in the Apple ecosystem to buy an Apple TV and only use non-Apple services.
The only thing that will probably suck is the lack of things like MiraCast and Google's Casting stuff, but you could use third party AirPlay software (still free IIRC) to stream whatever you want if you want to use screen mirroring.
These days people tend to use their media boxes as App Launchers for other services anyway, so it doesn't really matter that much anymore.
Yeah, the Apple TV would be my suggestion as well even if it's your only Apple device. Other than streaming service apps (Netflix, Hulu, etc...) I think the only app I've installed is Tailscale. It's a great device that is slightly more privacy respecting than similar devices from Roku or Smart TV manufacturers.
I've never owned a Mac before but now I'm thinking about getting one just so I can write software to run on my Apple TV. It's a pretty powerful computer that's tiny, silent, always on, barely uses any power, and is connected to my TV.
I'm going to check out VLC though. Thanks for the tip.
One other app that I had and forgot about is some remote play client for Steam. I start Steam on my desktop PC then pair my PS5 remote to the Apple TV, start the Steam tvOS app, and I can play games from my PC on the Apple TV.
I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, but I have an Apple TV. It really "just works", has been the less annoying out of the various devices I've used over the years (Roku, Fire stick etc.) My only nit is the stupid easy to lose remote, but I use a Harmony universal remote to avoid that stupidity.
"Google TV Streamer" is Googles official one, it's very streaming focused, any Android TV device of a reputable brand is good. NVIDIA Shields being the best.
I can recommend the app "Stremio" which has an extensive add-on ecosystem you can explore, works on Android, Android TV, Linux, MacOS and Windows!
I've semi-recently gone down the TV platforms rabbit hole again, and my overall impression is that they're all horrible.
I ended up grabbing a 6-year-old mini PC I had lying around in the basement and a >10-year-old TV that my father-in-law was going to throw away, as well as a Logitech y-10 air mouse [1] that I am lucky enough to have bought way back in the day.
I put desktop Linux on the PC with KDE plasma (avoiding Kodi, which, somehow, consistently attracts me but then annoys and frustrates me whenever I actually use it) and Brave.
I cranked up the scaling factor in KDE, and made a tiny tweak so KDE won't ask for superuser passwords and passwords on wallet access.
The browser is the only app I ever use on that thing, although it also has a DVD drive and VLC, and I copied my film collection onto the local disk of that thing.
I logged into all the media platforms I pay for (and the free ones I frequently use) and made an HTML file that links to all of them, using a huge font size, and setting it as home in the browser.
It cost me $0 (considering all the recycling), and it's a better experience than anything that money will buy.
I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.
Last time I tried, I found that the VOD platforms I care about have their respective best implementations in their Desktop/Web-versions. Android Apps were not always available, and to the extent that they were, half of them were on Amazon/Fire, half of them on Android TV/Google Play. I remember, in one case (Masterclass), they used the Android App to upsell me on their "Premium" subscription (or maybe it was the download-feature on the Android App).
So I would have had to pay more, switch between multiple HDMI sources to switch to the platform with the app I wanted to consume, and would still have had to use my desktop PC for some of the content I was paying for.
And then, I could never get the apps I actually cared about to occupy most of the screen real estate (or at least be suitably prominently placed). Most of the real estate was dedicated to dark patterns trying to get me to pay for stuff I didn't want to pay for, even though I was already a happy paying customer for more than enough stuff and there wasn't a “give it a rest, already” setting anywhere to be found.
I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age.
It's just such a sad and sorry state of affairs. How did we get here?
> I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.
These things just spam analytics and ad requests 24/7 too. The only one that's tolerable (and quite good) is Apple TV.
I bought the 4K Max thinking it might be the best option for 4K streaming from all of the major providers as an upgrade for my aging Mi Box (3, I think); aside from the home screen being majority advert, the AV sync is constantly out and differs per-app, so changing it for one makes another worse, WiFi signal is poor and the whole thing is only "acceptable" performance wise.
I suppose Amazon is subsidising the pricing, the the advert laden home screen is a given, but AV sync when it's plugged directly into the HDMI port on the TV is appalling. The Prime Video app on it is disgracefully slow to input and browser, but in that department I find Netflix is really the only app that does perform well on the various TV devices I've tried.
At one point, I thought I wanted an Android TV box, but I realise now that I really don't care so long has it has all of the major streaming apps and performs well (a half decent remote is a must too).