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Is any edition of firetv good for live TV?


rykr

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I use Fire TV 3's and they work well. I turn on Direct Stream and it takes like 3-4 seconds to tune in a HD channel. They have a built in mpeg2 decoder so the picture quality is good with OTA and HDHomerun. The new Fire TV has a Mpeg2 decoder as well but I haven't tested it so I'm not sure of the quality of it vs Fire TV 3. If your picky of Picture quality you may want to get both and see if you notice a difference in the decoder. If you are going to go Android and do Live TV you want either a Shield or a Fire TV. Nobody else has good Mpeg2 decoders.

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I use Fire TV 3's and they work well. I turn on Direct Stream and it takes like 3-4 seconds to tune in a HD channel. They have a built in mpeg2 decoder so the picture quality is good with OTA and HDHomerun. The new Fire TV has a Mpeg2 decoder as well but I haven't tested it so I'm not sure of the quality of it vs Fire TV 3. If your picky of Picture quality you may want to get both and see if you notice a difference in the decoder. If you are going to go Android and do Live TV you want either a Shield or a Fire TV. Nobody else has good Mpeg2 decoders.

 

 

What do you mean you "turn on direct stream"?  Also, how's the de-interlacing?   Have you tried it on channels with interlaced content?

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pünktchen

FireTV 3: 1080i x264 hw deinterlacing is bad.

FireTV Stick 4k: 1080i x264 hw deinterlacing not possible, SD deinterlacing also broken with latest firmware.

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What do you mean you "turn on direct stream"?  Also, how's the de-interlacing?   Have you tried it on channels with interlaced content?

Under settings for Live TV you turn on "Direct stream Live TV" which turns off the pause ability but provides for much faster channel changing. De-interlacing is very good. That's what I mean by mpeg2 decoder. It has hardware mpeg2 decoding built in which makes it work great for channels like CBS and NBC which broadcast in 1080i. Devices like the Mi Box and the Sony Android TV etc simply don't have a good mpeg2 implementation. Now that only matters if you have a Hdhomerun Connect for the most part. You could get a Tablo etc and bypass this. You could also get a HDHomerun Extend and set it to the Highest quality. That or the new Recast. But either way the Fire TV 3 and theoretically 4K Stick should de-interlace well.

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FireTV 3: 1080i x264 hw deinterlacing is bad.

FireTV Stick 4k: 1080i x264 hw deinterlacing not possible, SD deinterlacing also broken with latest firmware.

Who knew. Well I guess if you do Extend then you'd want 720P. Otherwise the Connect and regular 1080i mpeg2 should work well.

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pünktchen

Us TV. I've seen fire TV not be very good at deinterlacing imho

So probably mpeg2 video. At least hw deinterlacing should work then with every FireTV device. If it satisfies your quality needs is another question.
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