Having ditched Apple TV2 which was becoming increasingly buggy I went in at the cheap end of the market just to test the water and plumped for the Amazon Fire TV Stick. For £35 I reckoned if it all went wrong then I haven’t lost much, and I could still use the stick as an (albeit far inferior) media player for things like Netflix and iPlayer.
Again, following a little time spent YouTubing I managed to install Kodi 14.0 and off I went in search of addons. Again, Fusion was my starting point and I also learned how to install one off addons by using File Manager and Install From Zip File. It wasn’t long before I had built up a good number of reliable addons to my collection from the likes of SALTS, Vdubt25 and UK Turks.
The difference between the Apple and the Amazon was instantly obvious. Where there was lag on every button press with Apple, the Fire Stick was much sharper. What I had previously put down to broadband capabilities was actually the functionality of the Apple TV. I was massively impressed with my cheap and cheerful set up and it worked a treat.
Screen shot with Kodi shortcut in main menu
It was then that I started telling a small number of mates about my new found toy and the requests came flooding in. To date I have done around 20 set ups and each time have tinkered with different builds, skins and addons tailored to each person. For a while I found Isengard 15.0 wasn’t great, so I reverted to using Helix 14.2 (which I still have running on my main device) and this has proved to be very reliable. I now have 15.2 running on my other devices and to be fair, this has been stable since day one too.
I have to say there are some great builds out there and some very talented people giving up a lot of time and effort – they are the people that keep this whole project going. For me though, I must admit I find Confluence skin the easiest to navigate and the clutter free layout (once you have stripped away anything unnecessary) is still my favourite. Using ADBFire I managed to push jpegs and other files onto the Fire Stick to personalise the skin, and now I wouldn’t use any other.