For quite some time now (i.e. 2+ years) I’ve had a smallish Foxconn x86(AMD E-450) HTPC in the living room, along with a Roku 3, which I also bought a couple of years ago. This is all in addition to a big fat (and antiquated?) Comcast cable/DVR box.
To save money, I downgraded my Comcast tier already some time ago, down to the next-to-lowest one, but It’s -still- costing me an arm and a leg every month and I hardly use the bloody thing. With few exceptions, I just use the thing to watch a small bit of CNN every day, and also numerous random PBS shows. I can get most of the PBS stuff via my Roku, so really, the only thing that’s kept me from cutting the cord on greedy Comcast has been the live CNN, which I wasn’t eager to lose. But apparently now that’s available on Sling TV, so I could cut the cord and get that either on my Roku or… if I decide to go that way… on a new Fire TV(v2) box.
This is probably what I’ll do, i.e. buy a Fire TV2 box and buy a subscription to Sling TV.
If I do, maybe I can use the Fire TV box to replace -both- the Roku -and- my old x86 HTPC. If so, I’d be happy. About the only thing I use the Roku for is watching free stuff from YouTube… some of which is actually quite good (i.e. older documentaries), but the user interface on the Roku YouTube channel is absolute crap. It is REALLY painful to try to fast forward past some stuff you’re not interested in. My hope is that the Fire TV interface to YouTube will be better. (It can’t be worse.) Can anyone comment on that?
Anyway, if I’m goona get a Fire TX(v2) box… which is on sale now… I would really like to be able to toss the Concast box&subscription -and- the Roku -and- my old HTCP, but I wonder about a couple of things…
First, assuming that I’m going to hardwire the Ethernet on the FTV2 (i.e. -not- use the built-in WiFi), have any of you who also do this seen any issues with the bandwidth? I’m a bit disappointed that the ethernet on the FTV2 is only 10/100. Amazon obviously cheaped-out on this. I’m just wondering if it will make paging through directories of my own local (NFS) content sluggish or not. (It seems that perhaps the Right Way to get more bandwidth into an FTV2 is to use the built in WiFi and *not* hardwire the thing, which just seems odd to me.)
Also, I have some content which is 1080p/60 (AVC/AAC). Can the FTV2 deal with that OK? (I’m guessing that if it can do any kind of 4K HD… which it can… then 1080 at 60 fps won’t be a problem, correct?)
More important still, how well does it handle playing of local (NFS or Samba) MPEG2 DVD rips?
(I also have an inexpensive Amlogic S905 box lying around (which I got for dirt cheap) that wasn’t able to deal with my MPEG2 ISOs at all, at least not with the Kodi for Android that it shipped with. Of course, the MPEG2 ISOs all work perfect on this S905 box if I boot the thing to LibreELEC instead of using the stock Android it shipped with, but if I get an FTV2 I won’t want to be booting the thing back and forth between Android and LibreELEC all the time. I’d just want to leave it booted to Android and thus, I hope that Kodi for Android on this box will properly play my MPEG2 ISOs.)