According to the official Amazon Fire TV Stick specs (1st Gen) it can play MPEG4 videos up to 1080p. But whenever I start a video with this codec my server starts transcoding.
Why is this happening? Am I missing something?
If it helps here are the specs of two files I’ve tried today: https://imgur.com/a/70qzSmP
Here’s a screenshot of my dashobard when this happens: https://imgur.com/zLCuv6X
I believe the issue is the avi container. Try remuxing your file into an mp4 or mkv container and see if that works.
The second file they have there is an MKV.
I’ve tried a few Xvid codec files on my Fire Stick 4K, and while they direct play, they don’t play correctly. The motion is juddery like it’s only playing half the frames. I had one file that played correctly, it was a 720p file.
It wasn’t worth figuring out and I just replaced all of them with new encoding in h264.
Ah thanks. Amazon is quite vague on codec/container support. I saw one thing that said the Fire TV (1st gen) only support mpeg4 in a 3gp container, which seems wrong to me. Maybe just stick with MP4 which is what should be used for mpeg content anyways.
This is what I found in terms of specifications: https://developer.amazon.com/de/docs/fire-tv/device-specifications-fire-tv-stick.html?v=ftvstickgen1
Right, but it doesn’t mention which container the codec needs to be in, which is an important detail that is being left out. Plex will support mpeg-4/xvid in both mkv and mp4 but the Fire TV itself may not. I suggest trying an mp4.
The other file I posted an image of was MKV. So this combination (MKV with MPEG4) is also not supported by the Fire TV stick?
Their specs don’t mention it, so I can’t verify. I’ll have to find an xvid file to test myself. But the normal container for XVID video would be MP4.
Fire can’t handle xvid with packed b frames. On my fire tablet this would trigger a transcode. On latest gen Fire TV Stick it would try to play it, but look jittery like it was dropping a ton of frames.
You can fix the files without any re-encoding or loss of quality with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i INPUT.avi -codec copy -bsf:v mpeg4_unpack_bframes OUTPUT.avi
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