Behold, the Fire TV Cube
It’s a combo Fire/Echo, but it can also plug into your cable box, TV, and sound system. So you can tell it to power on your TV and change the channel on your cable box.
Interesting. If I knew for sure this could completely replace my Harmony Hub and Echo setup I’d be in with a preorder. Figure they’ll match the price on either Prime Day or Black Friday though and by then there’ll be enough in the wild to understand its limitations.
If your TV supports HDMI-CEC, you don’t have a separate receiver for sound, and you don’t use any other devices like game consoles on that TV, it should replace the harmony yes.
Yep, the consoles are where I’m currently unclear. Losing voice activation for the Xbone and PS4 are a complete nonstarter. In theory they should work but if they did you think Amazon would call that out on the product page like they did with other devices.
I was looking at the ports. It can plug into your TV with HDMI-CEC. It has an IR blaster to control cable boxes and what not.
In theory they could work, if Amazon allows you to select different inputs on your TV either through the FireTV UI or an Alexa command. My guess is they won’t do that, though.
I’ll take one for the team, so pre-ordered. I guess I’m an aggressive early adopter for Amazon Echo devices, or something, but then again I was in the market for a new TV media player anyway and I’ve wanted good movie/show voice control for a while now. $89.99 is under my budget limit for that.
One feature I’d like to see is the ability for a grouped Echo to output to Bluetooth/line-out. All of my Echos are in an “Everywhere” group and thus my living room Echo cannot direct its audio to my living room speakers.
Roku is the best option for streaming. It is platform agnostic, which means the only thing missing is Apple stuff, their hardware has always been rock solid (at least on the 2 roku and the Roku TV I have) and their library of streaming is great.
The search feature is awesome, and will aggregate most of the streaming services together (so you can find where a movie is streaming for free)
The one thing i LOVE about the roku though, is the headphone jack on the remote. So great for apartment living, or working out on the treadmill.
ShieldTV is better, but it is admittedly much more expensive.
From early previews, it looks like the FireTV Cube will change the volume on your soundbar or audio receiver through its IR blaster.
After trying a TCL Roku for a couple of months I have gotten super annoyed at my Amazon fire. Roku is clearly superior.
- multisource voice/text search now
- Clean, easy to use interface. Easy to move icons around.
- It actually works and doesn’t make me reset Netflix every few months.
The only bad is I still don’t see an easy way to cast youtube stuff from my laptop to the TV. Did they remove it or am I doing something wrong?
Youtube casts to Roku just great after you install the Youtube app on Roku (and you may need to log in? I don’t know). I have had some issues going from PC to Roku though, I end up always using my phone Youtube app instead to make the hand off to the Roku Youtube app.
But casting from PCs via screensharing is another story. It is essentially broke unless you use a Chromecast, which is a damn shame as far as I’m concerned. Both of my Amazon devices and my Rokus cannot screenshare.
I’m looking at a box (home for lunch) here at the house, filled with Fire sticks, Chromecasts, and Chromecast 2s. I’ve used them all for a decent amount of time, each. And each of them had their strengths and weaknesses.
What I have attached to all 3 of our TVs, however, are Rokus. It just seems to be a better combination of features and ease of use and overall performance, for me.
Yeah it’s annoying because say I am looking at a boardgame on my laptop and I start watching it and it’s interesting enough I want a big screen.
The workaround is to exit and just use a logged-in youtube to resume playing I guess. I have multiple google accounts thought so it gets annoying.
Thank you.
It does suck. I tend to start on my phone when I’m near the TV and the hand off with that is seamless, but when I’m on my PC it’s like… awww damn it.
I think there may be a Chrome extension or something to help out? I can’t remember anymore and it might have gone away.
I’m seeing a lot of people in this thread recommending the Roku. Has anyone used or can recommend the Nvidia Shield TV? It seems to be a pretty popular device.
Full disclosure: They jacked my cable bill up another $20 this month for no reason and I’m about ready to cut the cord. I’ve not used a fire stick, fire TV, or Roku etc so I’m 100% oblivious to the technology in general. I’d rather have a hard ethernet connection and not Wifi if possible hence a box over a stick…i think??
Don’t own a Shield, but I’ve read a lot about it. By all accounts its the one to get if money is no object. If I were still in the market for a box, it’s the one I’d get, but my WebOS TV serves most of my needs just fine. It’s certainly the best equipped for high end streaming (not to mention acting as a Steamlink). Roku’s the best value though and has the widest array of services/channels.
I have two shieldTVs, they work great. Extremely fast.
So my newly discovered cousins were at my party and they were somehow able to queue up youtube videos of tasteless music unto my TV center using their cell phones. I was confused how they were able to do it without any wifi password or whatever. (Apparently this is the linking Arrendek mentions upthread.)
The 20 year old started explaining to me and the 15 year-old insults me by saying “he doesn’t understand.” Ok, it’s true, I don’t understand. How does it do the magic? It looks like it uses local radio (Bluetooth) to find a device, then matches an associated PIN for security purposes. All queueing pushes a list to the associated account on some google server, and then the TV app reads it off the google server?
edit: Turns out it’s as simple as login in to the youtube app. Duh. Why didn’t they say so?
Wait - you can Chromecast to the nVidia Shield? Does it require a Chromecast be plugged in or does it have that capability built in?