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DigitalGypsy66
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Postby DigitalGypsy66 » Sun Dec 24, 2017 11:48 am

A little early Christmas gift for the DG family: increased our Internet to 100+/10 MBpS down/up for $15 less than what we were paying for 30/5 service.

Not a promotional deal either - although subject to "normal" increases and so on.

Freddy Rumsen
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Postby Freddy Rumsen » Mon Dec 25, 2017 12:51 pm

What I desire is Bluetooth speakers that I can put on a mantle and play music through that does not require to be plugged into the wall for power. Do not want to spend hundreds of dollars would rather spend about 50 bucks.

dodint
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Postby dodint » Mon Dec 25, 2017 4:46 pm

My Dad gave me a Fire Stick with Kodi and a bunch of preinstalled add ins.

I have played with it for about 2 hours and it has about a 90% fail rate when it comes to finding a stream of the content I ask for. I feel bad he spent money on it because he thinks it's the greatest thing ever and bought them for my sister and I. Only cool things I'm finding are old sporting events. Hoping this might be a way I can watch the Sky feed for F1 races, we will see.

blackjack68
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Postby blackjack68 » Mon Dec 25, 2017 8:18 pm

My Dad gave me a Fire Stick with Kodi and a bunch of preinstalled add ins.

I have played with it for about 2 hours and it has about a 90% fail rate when it comes to finding a stream of the content I ask for. I feel bad he spent money on it because he thinks it's the greatest thing ever and bought them for my sister and I. Only cool things I'm finding are old sporting events. Hoping this might be a way I can watch the Sky feed for F1 races, we will see.
Covenant for all movies and TV shows (although I’ve yet to find the All Access Stanley Cup series).

Google add-ons for live streaming sports to see what’s best. I was having good luck with Bennu for a couple weeks then it got hit or miss.

NTP66
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Postby NTP66 » Tue Dec 26, 2017 7:29 am

Source of the post Covenant for all movies and TV shows
Covenant should definitely be at the top of the list, for sure.

dodint
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Postby dodint » Tue Dec 26, 2017 8:48 am

Yeah, it's there. Again, most of the content I try to watch isn't there. The meta data is there which gives you hope but there usually are no streams. We tried about four movies, one loaded. A bunch of TV shows, the only one that loaded was incorrectly labeled. I did watch an old F1 race and that old Steeler game so it might have some value but for as long as it takes to navigate and actually find valid content it's a royal pain in the ass.

I just feel bad he spent the money, the thing is rubbish.

He's logged into the Firestick which is tied to his credit card. Can I just login with my own Amazon account or will that mess up Kodi and the plugins?

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Postby NTP66 » Tue Dec 26, 2017 8:52 am

Source of the post He's logged into the Firestick which is tied to his credit card. Can I just login with my own Amazon account or will that mess up Kodi and the plugins?
You can switch it to your own account, yes. It won't mess up any of your Kodi settings. I hope he didn't pay much for a Kodi-preloaded Firestick, because they used to just go for about $25 above the normal Firestick cost.

Not finding a stream is annoying enough, and likely to happen on obscure movies and shows (IMO), but finding a stream that winds up being wrong (bad metadata) is even more annoying. I ran into that issue with Covenant specifically on the latest season of TMNT. It kept pulling up streams from the 80s show.

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Postby dodint » Tue Dec 26, 2017 9:00 am

I already have a Chromecast so I didn't need a Firestick to begin with. I just feel bad, money is getting tighter for him so he doesn't need to be buying me stuff like this in the first place.

Thanks for the heads up on the account switching. I would get some functionality out of it as a Fire Stick when I travel if I can login to it on my own account. Chromecast is a pain in hotels since I have to setup my own local hotspot to run it. This might cut out a step or two which is significant since I spent 6-8 weeks a year in hotels.

Yeah, the stuff I was looking for was kind of obscure. There is metadata for every single Peanuts special but none of them had streams. The mislabeled metadata was an old MTV show called Undressed. They had all 5(?) seasons with episode recaps and everything, but when you ran the stream it was some new show from MTV that had the same name. Real buzzkill since I've been looking for the original ~1999 Undressed for years.

The rest were movies that are mostly still in theaters. My wife was super excited that Pitch Perfect 3 and some other stuff looked to be available, but again, no streams. I get it, I thought the stream would be a Russian bootleg or a screener, but it's annoying they put those entries on the list when they don't have the content at all. The newest thing that would stream was The Snowman which came out in October which is still pretty cool.

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Postby NTP66 » Tue Dec 26, 2017 9:09 am

I don't know which build is on your Firestick, but you've got some options available. In Covenant (or any of the apps, really), I've found that if you select one of the top picks, and the video that is played is wrong (bad metadata), try it again, picking from a different source down on the list. You'll be able to figure out which ones aren't as reliable.

If you continue to have that issue, you could also give Elysium or BOB Unleashed a try for those videos, assuming that those add-ons are installed on your build.

I miss the older Kodi days when you could directly search torrent sites and simply stream right from their magnet links. That may be available via an add-on right now, but I doubt it.

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Postby dodint » Tue Dec 26, 2017 9:15 am

Yeah, those are on there too.

I'll play with it. Just wish I hadn't tried to use it for the first time in front of my wife. He told her it had every movie and every show and every sporting event ever and could replace our cable, etc. She was super excited about it and then nothing would load. :lol:

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Postby NTP66 » Tue Dec 26, 2017 9:17 am

:lol: My parents use their Fire TVs for probably 80% of their viewing. I still stick to my routing of downloading the content I want and simply transferring it to my TiVos on an as-needed basis.

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Postby skullman80 » Tue Dec 26, 2017 9:53 am

I have a fire stick with Kodi installed on the porch TV since I didn't want to run a cable line out there and pay Fios for another set top box. I really hope that whoever gave you that firestick didn't pay much to have it jailbroken. I bought a normal firestick from amazon and jailbroke it myself in about 5 to 10 minutes. Coevenant works pretty well for me for the newer movies that are still in theaters. The obscure stuff can be hit and miss though no doubt.

I actually used some paid service for a bit that was like 3$ month that went through and found the best links and put them at the top of the list when you did a search. It was a minimal cost and I did feel my hit rate was better with older stuff and the new in theater stuff was all HD quality. It seemed to filter out alot of the crap. I'd have to go and look up the name though. The jailbroken stick is nice to have, but it's not our main source for outside. I can still cast from my phone anything we have running on the Fios stuff outside to the tv if we want to watch normal Fios stuff and can stream to the Chromecast for other things. It's a nice option to have out there, but I couldn't see using it for my main source of viewing TV.

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Postby Miami Vice » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:09 am

Theres a managing director where I work who wants me to "fix" his 3rd party add-ons since Exodus or whatever he bought doesn't work anymore. Dude makes at least half a million a year and he's like "this saves me so much money from going to the theater"

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Postby NTP66 » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:12 am

I'd laugh, but honestly, I get it. Especially with movie theater prices these days.

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Postby dodint » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:14 am

I'm trying to give it a shot. Was watching a 720p stream of Baby Driver last night and it kept freezing every 3 minutes or so. It's like they only buffer out to 7-10 seconds to conserve bandwidth or something, I don't know. Finally got fed up and switched to the third or fourth ranked stream and finished the last 40 minutes with no problem. I'll get the hang of it eventually but my wife has given up.

Is there a way to just download the movies and watch later? There are file folders everywhere but I've never seen a download button. Even if it was just one movie at a time that would be fine.

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Postby Miami Vice » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:22 am

I know not everyone is as into a/v stuff as I am, but I can't imagine spending all that money to have a home theater room built into your Treesdale McMansion, getting taken to the cleaners on product mark-ups and "premium" cables, and then be cool with watching a horrible stream of It filmed at an angle inside a theater complete with shaking and coughing.

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Postby Miami Vice » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:24 am

Is there a way to just download the movies and watch later? There are file folders everywhere but I've never seen a download button. Even if it was just one movie at a time that would be fine.
If you really want to use it that way I'd suggest using a VPN and looking into Radarr to automate procuring things you'd like to watch.

I think the 3rd party add-ons expose you to a torrent swarm.

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Postby NTP66 » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:26 am

Running Plex on a PC would be a better solution, provided that you were okay with downloading the movies yourself.

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Postby dodint » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:30 am

That's a functional "No", then. Just wondered why the apps had file folder spaces built in if you can't download. Configuring this thing any further sounds like a chore that I don't want to deal with.

What I see happening is over time the Kodi plug-ins will stop working and then I'll just have a regular Fire Stick, which is incrementally better for travel than my Chromecast so it still adds some value.

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Postby Miami Vice » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:34 am

If my Plex server was more powerful (I'm able to direct play/direct stream most things), and my upstream speed was better (only 5Mbps), I'd share it with more people. I just can't have more than one remote person trying to watch a movie at once on it.

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Postby NTP66 » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:38 am

WTF? Are you getting your internet service from 1998?

Viva la Ben
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Postby Viva la Ben » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:39 am

I know not everyone is as into a/v stuff as I am, but I can't imagine spending all that money to have a home theater room built into your Treesdale McMansion, getting taken to the cleaners on product mark-ups and "premium" cables, and then be cool with watching a horrible stream of It filmed at an angle inside a theater complete with shaking and coughing.
:lol: cam movies remind me of why I hate going to the theater....with today’s yuge TVs I’d rather wait for the legit digital release than pay 4x as much to take family.

Miami Vice
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Postby Miami Vice » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:40 am

100 (or maybe its 120 down?) 5 up. Works fine for me. The only time I really need the uplink personally is if I'm away somewhere and want to access my DVR or cable tv subscription.

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Postby Miami Vice » Wed Dec 27, 2017 10:44 am

speaking of movie prices, I'd been considering buying into Movie Pass. The main reason I didn't was because I wanted to see how the Rangos Giant Cinema would shake out. I knew they wouldn't accept Movie Pass, but it looks like they're only going to get a few Hollywood films per year there.

My sister bought my wife and I each 3 month Movie Pass trials for Christmas. I figure I'll activate it ahead of the May-June-July season.

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Postby blackjack68 » Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:09 am

@dodint

What's your internet speed? I used to have buffering issues, but since we've upgraded it's almost nonexistant.
We went to the Verizon Gig plan.

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