Is Amazon Fire TV v1 on the future roadmap?

1st Official Post

    I'm wondering if the older Fire TVs (especially the stick) might eventually be the perfect device to run LibreElec at some point in the future? As newer and newer versions of Fire TV devices come out, the older one's will likely be unable to perform very well with the latest FireTV OS. And they will likely be unsupported in the future.

    Is anyone looking into making these devices run LibreElec natively?

    • Official Post
    Quote from mcowher

    May I ask why such a resounding "no"? This is an incredibly popular device.

    For starters, we got our hands full already as-is with the current supported hardware. A lot, if not all, of our sparetime goes in the LE project.

    Secondly, I don't believe any of the team members has a Fire TV box old or new. So developing and testing is already a problem. I have no idea what sort of hardware is in a Fire TV, and if we would even get support from Amazon. Probably not.

    Thirdly, starting support for old(er) hardware is not part of our future plans.

    • Official Post

    There is no hardware accelerated decoding support for qualcom gpu's on linux (other than V4L2 which isn't supported in kodi)

    Then I have no idea if it's even possible to get linux running on it.

    Quote from mcowher

    LOL. It's not that bad of a device. Granted...It currently has a locked bootloader, but someone will unlock it.

    The device is what... 2 years old? or even older? And you believe that someone will work hard on unlocking it? Why don't you install SPMC on it or so? Works very good as kodi in Android.

    It appears the bootloader can be unlocked if you were able to root it while it was on an older version of the FireOS:

    How to Fully Unlock the Amazon Fire TV Bootloader | AFTVnews

    However, even with it fully unlocked and rooted, it's probably not worth it. Sorry for bothering everyone about this.

    I was however under the impression that LibreElec was geared towards running well on older hardware and that was one of the advantages of the software. I'm running it on a PC that is 7 years old, and on an under-powered G-Box MX2 and it runs very well.