Yes....
Jailbroken Firesticks and digital tv boxes are misinderstood terms.
Simply get Firesticks from eBay, Amazon, Best Buy for $25-35 and download apps til you find ones you like.
Get 2nd generation sticks and save paying $30-50 to have someone "jailbreak" it.
Kodi WAS good, but needs routine updating when scripts, files and links stop working. Kodi is good for beginners nlbut pain in ass typing those links without a keyboard
Hey, I had to get my inner nerd on.
sticks out tongue at the normals
You'd be surprised at how ubiquitous those Raspberrys are. I've found them inside OEM manufactured cellular telephone repeaters that we repair at work. Not to mention that high school kids use them to build little video games and other craziness. They're really cool little boards,
I've back loaded an iptv app to my firestick. Getting tons of channels and plenty of sports for less than 100 per year.
PA: Maybe he should just buy a tv and load all the apps he wants.
:-D
"I've got too many hours invested in burning all of my media to my drives for a disaster to ruin it all. "
HAHAHA! Got that right! That's why I make 2 backups from the primary drive and take them offline when not in use and always have a current backup of any additional files.
~Allen
PAG, you could set up a fairly inexpensive RAID with the Raspberry and a couple of hard drives, running OpenMediaVault. That's what I did for my current single drive NAS (I'll probably set up a second drive for a RAID 1 system after the holiday season's over, when I have more time). The newest Raspberrys have a gigabit ethernet port now, so they work quite well, and they cost about $40-60 for the board and an SD card. Plus, they're fun to play with in making other things.
There is no such thing as a "jail broken" firestick either.
Seriously...…………………………. is that NCal? I use to think only Ncal could post something so absurd, not to mention the stuff PA corrected him on.
We have a windows server for media, but recently I am finding our Netgear Nighthawk Media server more functional and our 4K tvs decode h.264 and h.265 movies with way less cpu processes one dedicated server can give.
~Allen
Funny thing, I cut the cord years ago and I'm plenty happy with it. There's very little on live TV that interests me.
I took a couple of Raspberry Pi's and set them up as my media server (with Kodi) and as my NAS for locally stored movies/TV shows etc. Both work great, and I keep a spare Raspberry around. If one of the Raspberry's go kablooie, I just move the SD card over to the new Raspberry and I'm back up in less than 10 minutes. Had to do that only once when we had a bad lightning storm last year.
There's a lot of cool, and free video and streaming apps available in Kodi, but it's kind of difficult to set up until you get used to Kodi. Honestly, I don't use any of them though.
The ironic thing is that the only live TV that I consistently like to have is CSPAN, and it's one of the most difficult to get set up consistently on Kodi.
You don't need any Roku, Firestick, Apple TV, etc....
If you want to buy one, get one and download the apps you want.
There is no such thing as a "jail broken" firestick either.
All you need is a smart tv and Wifi, and download the apps the you like.
Use your tv controller to navigate thru the apps.
There's apps with ALL of the cable stations, movies, tv shows, news, weather, only sports, Hustler, Penthouse.
Even live camera feeds of major streets, famous landmarks and beaches around the world.
“These various options (Google, Amazon, Roku, ect) its no different than what kind of car you like to drive I think. ”
Spot on. Some of my TVs come with the Roku software-based access and yet I found my preference to be the fire TV adapter.
As with the research you mentioned, if he just looks around for a deal he can probably find a sale and get a Fire TV adapter for the same price as the Fire stick and you get so much more in hardware performance and functionality.
~Allen
PA: 30GB! Wtf! I do good to stay under 1TB a month!
I tried Roku and found it clunky. As with Roku and Amazon, you must have an account, they pretty much cover the exact same apps. Tvs are starting to use Google, Fire Tv and proprietary OS more now over Roku, although still populated on a lot of tvs as you indicated. Visio, Samsung, LG and Sony are several so far.
~Allen
Get the 4K native Fire Tv version 2018 over the Firestick, it has an optional Ethernet adapter for wired Ethernet over long wireless spots. The Fire Tv 2018 version has a quad core snapdragon vs a dual core on the Firestick. We have 5 of them working flawlessly.
You must have an existing data account, of course, and a current cable account and it be listed as a qualifying company in each app you want to use, such at TNT, A&E, FX, Syfy, etc...., then it gives a code and you log into your cable account to provision the app with that code. I hacked mine to stream xfinity live app, but not going into that depth of field how to root your Amazon box.
You would have access to this wonderful and most useful information had you not preemptively blocked me for no good reason. Maybe someone will be nice enough to pass the information along that I took the time to give you.
Good luck!
~Allen
