Treated myself to a new 4k Fire Stick on Prime day as an upgrade to my current Fire TV Gen 2 (Box) but its not being much of a treat.
For some reason all HD channels on UK Freeview just freeze the display (audio keeps playing but image locked like a screenshot) after a few seconds of playing. Have to then press home mutiple times to get out and force close the app. They play fine on the older Fire TV Gen 2 but I read that the new 4k stick is supposed to be better for live tv as it can play interlaced content since it was fixed with the latest firmware (installed).
Anyone else had the same issue, I’ve moved it closer to the router and I can play large video files without issue so connectivity is fine. Tried changing audio passthrough settings but no luck, not sure what else I can try tbh before I send it back.
Same problems, I’ve currently got all the HD channels blocked so Plex doesn’t try and tune to them, absolutely no luck getting them to work, it’s annoying there isn’t any issues on the old fire sticks in the kids bedroom, just a shame I opted for the premium 4K one for the living room
Forgot I’d made this thread as the Fire Stick 4k has just been sat unplugged due to this issue.
I did some digging and found that it is a well known issue and Amazon knows about it but they need their vendor to fix it and while some updates have helped in other countries it hasn’t fixed the issue in the UK.
Apparently SiliconDust have now updated their app to disable de-interlacing from being used on the 4k stick but last time I tried it the app still crashes and so does Plex.
I’ve gone back to using the my Fire TV box Gen 2 until a good deal comes up on another Nvidia Shield as that is the only device I’ve found that actually works with a decent picture (just a bit expensive for a second tv).
I’m encountering the same issue on a Fire stick 4K, some channels are fine but others start playing (usually all pixelated/green), get a picture for a short while then freezes, I then have to force close the Plex app before it will function again. The channels that do this do it consistently, all of which work OK via the latest Android and Windows apps so it doesn’t appear to be a Plex server fault.
I have this issue too (4k fire tv stick + plex app), it’s incredibly frustrating and the only “solution” I’ve found is to force everything to transcode to 720p, which sucks as it means I can’t watch DVR / live tv in 1080p
Same here. If I try to play certain UK channels on Fire Stick 4K I either get nothing or a green/pixelated screen while the audio plays ok. If I try to back out Plex still shows the green screen.
I have to force close the app to get back into Plex.
I’ve attached some logs from the Fire TV Plex app, the Plex server & adb logs from the Fire TV stick that cover a time period when I tuned a channel that froze the screen. Hopefully someone from Plex will take a look, it’s currently unusable and we’ve replaced old TV tuning equipment for this so it’s imperative for me that the issue is fixed.
I’ve just tested it on a OnePlus 6 with Android 9.09 and Live TV runs fine, including the problem channels on the Fire stick, so it’s not all Android devices.
So a couple of prerequisites here: defo need to make sure network / wifi speed is good enough (if you can watch amazon prime ok then would say your fine) and you need a plex server with a decent cpu and or gpu.
Try turning down your h.264 transcode level on your fire tv stick. Scroll up to top - hit enter on your username and go to settings - down the bottom is where you find the transcode level. I found 3 -3.1 the most I could go. start at the bottom and increase it until the screen freezes / crashes etc.
Like I say you will need a decent server (mines a desktop pc with quad core processor and nvidia gpu - It is using 15% CPU and 25% of my GPU to handle this transcode)
As the transcode level goes down, quality decreases, but I would say the fire tv stick is just not powerful enough to unpack the top level (4-5) transcodes. If your after the best quality picture then probably a Nvidia tv is a better client choice than a fire.
I didn’t mention above but I also have a couple of standard 1080p firesticks on other TVs and these run fine, it’s just the 4K sticks that cause the problem. The 4K sticks are a higher specification than the 1080p sticks so I can’t believe it’s due to insufficient hardware.
I’ve just found this on the Amazon GitHub site which relates to the Fire TV media player, I’m assuming this is likely to be the root cause -
I understand where your coming from about the tv sticks. I have never had a HD stick so I don’t know - but I doubt the older sticks have the option for level 4+ h.264 transcodes as this level is not needed for standard HD therefore this may be the reason why they work seamlessly. The 4k sticks on the other hand will have to be able to by their nature being 4K.
Have you tried lowering the H264 level on your stick? It worked on everyone of my 4k fire tv sticks - seamless live tv
Weirdly I cant have it above 3.1 for live tv but can have it higher to watch almost lossless Bluray ripped films in my library - MP4 H.264 level 4.1 It plays directly no transcoding.
When I watch live tv HD on my server (desktop pc) This process uses 15% of my CPU and 45% of my GPU - I cannot believe that a fire tv stick has this much processing power.
the trouble with recording direct from live tv is that it will record in mpeg format or non mp4. So im not sure your going to get the desired result.
Your plex server is transcoding (to mp4) this HD home run signal to your fire tv stick, if it thinks it can handle high level transcodes it will do this to save cpu power of your server I guess.
“H.264 . Hardware accelerated up to 1080p @ 30fps or 720p @ 60fps, 20 Mbps, High Profile up to Level 4”
No, as far as I understand it the recorded file isn’t transcoded (unless I configure it to?), Plex, or any other broadcast DVR, just dumps the transport stream onto disk as a .ts file . The .ts file being a container which contains files in the encoding format used by the broadcaster, in the case of the problem streams it being h.264 (level 4 in the file I’ve just looked at) @ 1080i resolution.
Lowering to 3.1 fixes live tv as it forces the server transcode, however, it seems to break audio on some of my files doing this. Audio (AAC) is streamed and video is transcoded.
Unfortunately this isn’t an option for me, I’ve got Plex servers with TV tuners in 2 locations. One’s a Synology NAS so no problem with transcoding there, but the server at the location where having Live TV matters is a Raspberry Pi so it’s direct stream or nothing .
Yea I don’t know about the difference between the 2 sticks it was just a guess.
All my recorded files from hd home run are MPEG2VIDEO - I run em through a video converter so the Plex server doesn’t always transcode them on the fly.
When I watch from the server end - I select a channel to watch on the fire tv stick the server tells me its transcoding it to mp4. So I would guess the transport stream is MPEG2.
What your suggesting is probably true of the HD home run app
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