The new second generation Amazon Fire TV, released only a month ago, has been rooted for the first time. XDA forum member zeroepoch has successfully developed a hardware rooting method to be the first one to root the new Fire TV. Similar to the hardware rooting method which has been used to root the 1st-gen Fire TV and the Fire TV Stick, this rooting method invloves soldering wires directly to the Fire TV’s circuit board, to directly access the eMMC storage chip, in order to modify the device’s file system. Not many people will be proficient and/or brave enough to use this method since one can easily ruin their Fire TV, which zeroepoch did himself when he fried his first Fire TV. For the brave among you, zeroepoch says he’ll be packaging up his scripts and releasing all the details of his rooting method soon. This method is currently very specific to software version 5.0.3.1, so if you want to use his scripts unmodified, you should update your Fire TV to software version 5.0.3.1, which is currently the latest version, and then block software updates.
I’ve been in contact with zeroepoch and he has been able to extract his complete boot image, and has sent it my way. A complete boot image is necessary to try to replicate the new Fire tablet software rooting method with the 2nd-gen Fire TV. My initial experiments have not been promising, since I’ve been unable to boot the 2nd-gen Fire TV using zeroepoch’s unmodified boot image, which would be the first step to applying the Fire tablet’s rooting method to the Fire TV 2. It’s still early days, so once zeroepoch releases more details about his rooting method and the community gets their hands on his extracted images, we may see progress in software rooting the new Fire TV.
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For the non-techie, can someone explain what the benefit(s) would be to root the FireTV2?
With root you can mount NTFS or other file system drives to use with torrent applications or a HTPC’s NAS.
I can access my NAS on the network using Amazon store app on my unrooted AFTV2 – I can play movies and display pictures from the NAS.
I am using the Amazon Store app called Application Launcher to access all my native and side loaded apps (I only download directly from Google Play Store or Amazon Store).
Root access has many possibilities which even I’m not aware of all. But some examples are running a different launcher like nova launcher and have wallpaper backgrounds within that launcher.And some games or apps like nds drastic require a root app eg. lucky patcher to get full access. But I and everyone here don’t condone the use of patchers on Android apps, esp on aftv :). Rooted apps may have greater function with root access.
There is a firestarter launcher that you can side load now, which works well.
use kingroot app simlest method worked on my AFTV2 5.0.5
Rooting a fire tv will also give you access to connect an external hard drive without having to format it in fat32 format as currently required.
Any way I could get a copy of the image file? I would like to check out the image file…
@Chris, you can get the original system.img file and my modified system.img file from my web server at http://download.zeroepoch.com/aftv2/. Flashing the image without already having root is the most annoying part. This is actually not an eMMC hack (aka soldering), but similar access by bit banging on the MMC device system registers from a low-level bootloader.
@ken, this work was partly connected to my job. We have an interest in understanding the brand new A72 in the Amazon Fire TV 2 and having root give us more CPU control and other low-level details. Also being able to load performance monitoring kernel modules could come in handy.
Hi Eric (aka zeroepoch)! Glad to see you commenting. Thanks for the clarification and for posting your image files.
Hey Eric,
Just wanted to say thanks for your efforts and for posting the image files. I am absolutely looking forward to what is to come now that you have achieved root!
I finally created a new thread for the rooting stuff, http://forum.xda-developers.com/fire-tv/general/root-amazon-fire-tv-gen-2-4k-t3245407