I’d been using a Zotac Zbox for the past few years as an XBMC client pretty successfully. It has a great form-factor and the built-in remote gives it a reasonably high “spousal acceptance factor”. Had a few issues along the way but using the OpenElec distribution of XBMC worked well. Until last weekend when I awoke to the sound of…nothing. No fans, no hum of lights, nothing. It’s dead, Jim!
For my second screen, I have a Raspberry Pi also running OpenElec so I “promoted” it to the main device on our every day TV. It was “ok” but the GUI is incredibly slow and scraping for new content..well, it’s an overnight job on a big library. So I was about to go pick up a new Zbox for around $300 but figured I’d research what is new in XBMC devices. After many (many!) hours, I came to the conclusion that the Amazon FireTV may be “the one”. Trouble is, they are not available in Canada. I’d found several listings on ebay but it was looking like a $50 premium to get one. Short story – had it shipped to the US and had a friend forward it up. Gadget: ACQUIRED!
Onto the setup. Connection was silly easy – ethernet (it does have wifi) + HDMI and done. The remote is bluetooth so no need to even have line of sight. XBMC was insanely easy to install since Amazon have made it super easy to “sideload” apps (ie. get them on there without having to go though the app store). There’s no need to hack or root the box to install apps like XBMC – it’s just a menu option! Score. Here’s what I did to get XBMC going:
That’s it! XBMC then appears under settings->system->apps. You launch it as usual and “it just works”. I added my library and plugins and was up and running in no time. The library scrape speed is an order of magnitude faster than the Rapsberry Pi (and even a bit faster than the Zotac). I think that’s down to the quad-core proc and flash storage.
One other tweak is making XBMC launch from the main menu rather than having to go to settings->apps each time. It’s reasonably easy to do this using a tool called Llama. There’s some good instructions here
The other nice thing about the Amazon FireTV is it’s integration with Amazon video and specifically Prime. Prime is pretty cool with the amount of content available (especially on the TV show side). Being in Canada, we don’t get video access using prime but that’s easily “getaroundable” using a DNS service (I use SmartDNSProxy but there are zillions around). Once I had this setup, a US Amazon account (.com, not .ca) and a free preview of Prime (it’s $99/year after the first month and has other benefits), I had Prime on my AmazonTV. I did have an issue getting video playing which turned out to be my HDMI cable (Prime relies on HDCP which means you need a good HDMI connection) but after that…the world is good!
If you’re looking for a good XBMC box and can get hold of a FireTV, it’s a fantastic solution. And it’s only $84! It’s like they are paying me for a gadget! 🙂