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 ›
Support for external storage among Amazon Fire TVs, Fire TV Sticks, and Fire TV Cubes varies considerably between models. It’s, unfortunately, not as cut and dry as knowing if external storage is supported or not. Amazon has been doing a much better job lately with consistent support on newer Fire TV models, but, with the announcement of the new Fire TV Stick 4K Max, there have been questions about how its external storage support differs from the regular Fire TV Stik 4K and other models. Here is a breakdown of all the different types of external storage support and which Fire TV models support each type. 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 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 ›
Good news everyone, the new Fire TV will afterall support external storage through its USB port. A couple days ago I reported that Amazon had “Accessories Only” listed in their developer specs for the new Fire TV, implying that you could not mount a USB drive connected to the USB port on the back of the new Fire TV. Amazon has reached out to me, saying that that was an error, and that the USB port on the new Fire TV can be used with USB drives for external storage. Amazon has since updated their specifications page to now say the 2nd Generation Fire TV’s USB port is for “Accessories and media storage.” It’s unclear at this time if users will be able to move apps onto USB drives, like they currently can with the 1st generation Fire TV, or if a connected USB drive can only be used for media storage.
The device specifications page on Amazon’s developer portal states that the USB port on the back of the new Fire TV is for “Accessories Only”, while the USB port on the 1st generation Fire TV is listed as being for “Accessories and storage.” Similarly, the specs for external storage for the new device say “MicroSD up to 128GB”, while the old Fire TV says “USB up to 128GB.” This is pretty damning evidence that you will not be able to connect and access a USB drive with the new Fire TV like you can with the existing Fire TV.
It’s possible Amazon made it so that inserting a microSD card into the new Fire TV will completely replace the
Amazon says the “Accessories Only” specification was an error and that the new Fire TV does support external USB drives.
@AFTVnews
AFTVnews