Was looking at getting an Amazon Fire Stick or box and thought i’d look on Ebay to see if there were any 2nd hand ones.

Loads of listings for amazon Fire boxes / sticks with something called Kodi added on. Reading the listings it looks like its some alternative OS put on the fire stick / box that allows you to watch lots of free movies / tv.

Is this correct? So i get a fire stick with kodi installed and i can then watch loads of extra TV shows and movies??

Does it actually work and are the tv shows / movies recent ones. And is Kodi easy to use?

Thanks

It’s the new name for XBMC, which has been around for ages and is a general purpose media centre bit of software (originally written for the first Xbox, hence the name). It runs on all sorts of things these days.

It’s very extensible, so there are lots of different plug-ins to pull in video from different sources (eg. to view iPlayer video). Some of these point at streaming sites of dubious legality. Anything that’s any good is bound to be dodgy, and even if you’re comfortable with that then the sites keep changing so you’d need to keep faffing about to chase new ones.

The Fire TV stick itself is great though, but then we pay for Prime and Netflix.

KODI is the new name for XBMC which originated as the media manager for X-box. I’ve installed it on my PC to play around with it as I was thinking of using it as a front end to play movies streamed from my server. For that purpose its pretty good as it scrapes content for each movie and gives you some nice visuals with the box art and content info.

It also does video channels. Some of which are obvious like BBC i-player and Netflix (subscription required) and there appears to be a ton of other channels which I haven’t explored some of which may be free. The channels aren’t that strightforward to install but there are Youtube vids to help.

Its music player is basic so I weouldn’t bother with that for streaming music.

Once everything is set up Kodi itself is easy to use.

Suggest you do the same as me and install on your PC to get a feel for it.

and even if you’re comfortable with that then the sites keep changing so you’d need to keep faffing about to chase new ones

yeah i thought this might be the case, not sure i can be bothered faffing round adding new ones as they get shut down. Thought it sounded too good to be true!

Anyway am still tempted by a fire stick / box(most likely a none hacked one from amazon). What are the games like on them, worht paying extra for the box to get getter games than the stick version?

Kodi/xmbc is great – and once set up there’s no need to keep going back and faffing with it I’ve found.

Then again I don’t use the addons/plugins – it’s just to deliver the media we have on a 2TB HD that’s plugged into the back of the HTPC.

Wife and kids have no problem using it (got USB IR remote for HTPC as well).

We’ve got a Chromecast plugged into thte Telly upstairs, need something similar for the telly downstairs now the Wii is looking like support for stuff will dry up. Most tempted by a Fire stick at the minute as Chromecast doesn’t support Amazon prime/lovefilm…

Intersting comparison

Might end up getting two and just use the chromecast in the garage or something…

Don’t much fancy KOBI/XBMC as the missus will have to operate the thing and won’t be able to bend her head round it…

Loads of listings for amazon Fire boxes / sticks with something called Kodi added on. Reading the listings it looks like its some alternative OS put on the fire stick / box that allows you to watch lots of free movies / tv.

Nope. It’s just an app they have sideloaded onto the FireTV. What they may have done is installed a load of hooky addons from ’dubious repos’ that allow you to stream tv/films/sports.

If you want to install Kodi onto a FireTV, you might as well buy one legit from Amazon when they have their next £64 sale offer, and install it yourself.