[mythtv-users] Amazon fire stick 4K

[John Pilkington]

On 05/12/2018 19:47, Peter Bennett wrote:
> I saw some more questions and comments about fire stick in other 
> conversations.
> 
> I have been using the Amazon fire stick 4K for a couple of weeks now, a 
> few hours per night. In response to a question about ethernet - I am 
> using it with the amazon fire stick ethernet adapter and that works, but 
> at 100Mbit speed. 100Mbit is more than enough for 1080 HD TV. It has 
> worked perfectly. Just make sure to follow the wiki in setting up your 
> remote and setting up a custom playback profile for MPEG2, as mediacodec 
> MPEG2 does not work on this device so you need to set it to use standard 
> decoding, which it does fine.
> 
> Problems I did have -
> 
> One evening I just turned off the TV instead of shutting MythTV. I 
> turned the TV back on and saw the Fire home screen, but waht I did not 
> know is that  MythTV was still running in the background and it 
> prevented my backend from shutting down all night. Eventually next 
> morning I went into the fire stick applications and terminated MythTV 
> and then the backend could shut down. So be careful to always shut 
> MythTV frontend cleanly.
> 
> When I first set up the ethernet the fire stick lost the connection for 
> unknown reasons and would not do anything. Rebooting it fixed that.
> 
> The fire stick will not do anything at all if it does not have an 
> internet connection, even though you do not need internet for MythTV.
> 
> Peter

I've spent what feels like most of the past few days upgrading an old 
laptop from kubuntu 16.04 to 18.04; now it seems to be mostly 
operational - although only as 'localhost' - and I've come back to the 
firestick for some actual viewing.

This time I tried an old (Feb 2016) DVB-T2 1920x1080 at 25.00fps recording 
that seems to have escaped my post-processing efforts, and it locked up 
perhaps 30 seconds in, during the closing scenes of the programme 
before.  That was with mediacodec decoding.  It's playing fine and 
looking good with ffmpeg decoding, although all 4 cores are at around 
90% load in scenes with a lot of detail; I think I've seen one, of a 
crowd of flamingos, cited in the past as a test.  The image quality 
makes me think I should perhaps replace my defunct HD tuner after all.

At present I don't know what provoked the lockup.

John P