Amazon Fire Stick and Plex for audio streaming

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markshan

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My wife has a Prime account so I am thinking of getting a Fire Stick so the boy can watch Nick Jr stuff which is free with Prime. However, I'm thinking maybe there may be something in it for Dad too. So I have a couple questions...

My main PC (the one with all of my audio files) is hooked up by ethernet to my wireless modem (the one from the cable company). Will I be able to stream WAVs, FLACs, MP3s etc. from this wired computer to the stick? How about .ts video files?

Will there be any bitrate conversion inherent in the stream or will it all be native?

Will 4.0 or 5.1 WAVs/FLACs stream with all channels in tact?

I'm also open to other software suggestions, it just seems that Amazon pushes Plex. Thanks.
 
Anybody? I thought for sure that someone here would have a Fire stick and would have played around with it some.
 
My wife has a Prime account so I am thinking of getting a Fire Stick so the boy can watch Nick Jr stuff which is free with Prime. However, I'm thinking maybe there may be something in it for Dad too. So I have a couple questions...

My main PC (the one with all of my audio files) is hooked up by ethernet to my wireless modem (the one from the cable company). Will I be able to stream WAVs, FLACs, MP3s etc. from this wired computer to the stick? How about .ts video files?

Will there be any bitrate conversion inherent in the stream or will it all be native?

Will 4.0 or 5.1 WAVs/FLACs stream with all channels in tact?

I'm also open to other software suggestions, it just seems that Amazon pushes Plex. Thanks.

In our upstairs "TV room", we use Plex to wirelessly access the music and movies on my media server. If we use the Plex app on a Roku streaming box, the music is all downsampled to Dolby and downmixed to stereo. If we use the Plex app on our Vizio smart TV, all channels remain intact but are still downsampled to Dolby. So, obviously, I prefer to use the Vizio. It's pretty cool to get multichannel music in the TV room, and no big deal to me that it's downsampled because it's not my main listening room.

I hope that helps!
 
Someone gave me a Firestick for Christmas... I'm not sure how to incorporate it into my music world yet, but there was something called "Kodi" added to it by the friend who gave it to me, and that has allowed me to watch some interesting things... you may want to look in to that on youtube...
 
I've got all my files on a NAS as well and because my AVR is old and does DNLA slowly and clunkily, I've been considering alternatives ways of streaming mch. I've got a Fire TV and Plex premium, but the Plex app only seems to stream stereo. I know I can install Plex on Kodi and use that but I wish Plex would just provide mch audio support directly as launching an app to launch an app is a minor faff and not the slick solution I'd prefer. If Plex supports mch on newer Firestick I'd be tempted to just buy one but as far as I know, it doesn't.

I know I can use my BDP to stream and play mch audio but it's not a slick solution either. Maybe it's the best method just now though.
 
I've got all my files on a NAS as well and because my AVR is old and does DNLA slowly and clunkily, I've been considering alternatives ways of streaming mch. I've got a Fire TV and Plex premium, but the Plex app only seems to stream stereo. I know I can install Plex on Kodi and use that but I wish Plex would just provide mch audio support directly as launching an app to launch an app is a minor faff and not the slick solution I'd prefer. If Plex supports mch on newer Firestick I'd be tempted to just buy one but as far as I know, it doesn't.

I know I can use my BDP to stream and play mch audio but it's not a slick solution either. Maybe it's the best method just now though.

Although I use Kodi in my listening room, I also use Plex for other situations. In the family room, we have a Vizio smart TV with the Plex app and it does, in fact, stream in multichannel. (For what it’s worth, though, it won’t stream 4.0, so I added an empty .5 to solve the problem). Now, all that being said, I also have a Roku with the Plex app but it does NOT stream in multichannel.

So all of that is to say that it is possible to stream in multichannel with Plex, but I don’t know why the Plex app on the Roku won’t stream in multichannel but the one on the smart TV will.
 
This was posted about the Amazon Fire TV 4K recently on the Kodi forum:

No HD audio bitstreaming (DTS-HDMA, Atmos etc), poor support for a lot of interlaced content (typically used for TV shows), no support for VC-1 (typically used on older BDVs) hardware decoding (and not enough CPU power for software decoding), audio sync issues etc.

It’s also a very compromised solution for Netflix and other streaming services, as while Amazon Prime video has frame rate switching, the others are fixed at the system frame rate.
 
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