In an unexpected move, Amazon has added support for NTFS USB drives to the 3rd-gen Fire TV Cube. This is surprising because no Fire TV device in the past has ever supported NTFS formatted storage drives. Whether they were a Fire TV, Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick, or Fire TV Smart TV, they all only supported FAT32 drives out of the box and required some complex manipulation to support any other drive format. Read more ›
The 3rd-gen Fire TV Cube is far from the first Fire TV model to officially supports external USB media, but it is the first to include a built-in media player app from Amazon that can display videos, photos, and play audio files. This is the same app found on nearly all Fire TV Smart TVs, but this is the first Amazon has included it on one of its stand-alone Fire TVs. While it’s certainly not going to replace full-fledged media players like Plex, MrMC, or even VLC, it’s definitely handy to have for quick and simple access to your media files. Read more ›
One big unadvertised but significant difference between the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and the original Fire TV Stick 4K is how each one handles external USB storage. With the original Firestick 4K, you can connect a drive using an OTG cable and access files on that drive through 3rd-party apps, but the Fire TV operating system ignores the drive entirely. With the new Fire TV Stick 4K Max, external drives are fully supported, meaning, you can mount, format, and eject the drives. Most importantly, you can also use external drives to expand the device’s internal storage and move apps to the external drive. Read more ›
In Amazon’s current lineup of Fire TV models, the 2020 Fire TV Stick Lite, 2020 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick, and the Fire TV Cube (both 1st and 2nd-gen) support expanding their internal storage through the use of an external USB drive. Doing so allows you to move supported apps onto the external storage device to free up space on the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Cube’s internal storage space. The Fire TV Stick 4K, while it does support external USB devices to some extent, does not currently support moving apps to external storage. Here are what accessories you need for external storage, instucritions for how to configure your Fire TV device correctly, and how to move apps off of the internal storage. Read more ›
The Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K doesn’t officially support connecting anything to it except Amazon’s Fire TV Ethernet Adapter, but, using an inexpensive OTG cable it’s possible to use USB peripherals, such as keyboards and wired gamepads, as well as external USB drives. The support for USB drives, in particular, isn’t as thorough as the Fire TV Cube, which does officially support external storage, but it’s much better than the Fire TV 3 (pendant), which the Fire TV Stick 4K has replaced, so it’s a step in the right direction. Read more ›
The SD Card slot on the Element Fire TV Edition televisions is treated as the primary port for external storage, since it’s the only one that can be used to store apps, however, a USB drive connected to the USB port is just as accessible from within 3rd-party apps. The only catch is that you cannot have a USB Drive connected to each of the two USB ports simultaneously. Read more ›
The Element Fire TV Edition televisions have a full-sized SD card slot, as well as a pair of USB ports, where one is USB 2.0 and the other is USB 3.0 speeds. It was expected that only the SD card slot would be used for external app storage, since that’s the way the Fire TV 2 works with its microSD card slot. I can confirm that only the SD card slot on the television is available for external app storage. The television does recognize when you connect USB drives, but warns you that they cannot be used to store apps, like the Fire TV 1 can do. Files can be accessed through either the SD card or a USB drive via 3rd-party apps, like media players (e.g., Kodi, MrMC, SPMC, VLC, etc..) or file managers, but only the former can store apps to augment the Fire TV Edition televisions 16GB of internal storage.
Believe it or not, the setup you see in the above picture works. The Amazon Fire TV Stick 2 supports OTG USB cables out of the box without needing to root the device or change any configuration settings. What’s even more astonishing is that USB keyboards, USB mice, USB hubs, USB ethernet adapters, and even USB external storage all work perfectly with no extra effort or configuration whatsoever. Read more ›
Those “official” Fire TV USB drives I wrote about a couple weeks ago have just dropped a bit further in price. The post was popular, resulting in a nice discussion in the comments, so I thought those of you who bought one of the drives would like to know that you can probably contact Amazon customer support and be refunded the price drop amount. The 32GB drive dropped $2 to $8.99 and the 64GB drive dropped $5 to $15.99. The 128GB drive price has not changed and is still $29.99. There is also a 3 pack of 16GB drives that have dropped $5 to $19.99. These are all new all-time low prices for these USB 3.0 flash drives that are on Amazon’s official list of Fire TV compatible drives.
When the Fire TV received support for external USB storage, Amazon designated a handful of drives as officially compatible with the Fire TV. One of those drives, the PNY Turbo USB 3.0 flash drive, which is my personal drive of choice, has just gone on sale at an all time low price. The 128GB drive is $29.99, the 64GB drive is $19.99, and the 32GB drive is $10.99. These are the lowest prices these drives have ever been. The PNY Turbo drives are a great balance of performance and value. While the Fire TV will work with a wide variety of drives, it nice to use one that’s been officially acknowledged by Amazon as being Fire TV compatible. You can use these drives to free up some of the Fire TV’s 8GB internal storage by moving large apps and games, if they support it, to the external drive, and you can even move Kodi’s data to them.
@AFTVnews
AFTVnews