Since my cousin's family was coming over to visit, I thought they might want to play Fibbage (or I wanted to play Fibbage with them), so I hauled out my Fire TV which I hadn't touched for months.
To my horror, I had left the batteries in the remote. Luckily I didn't see any leakage, but I took them out and cleaned them and put it back. For both remotes.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that the Fire TV boot up fine and recognize the remote.
All was well until I noticed the remote behaving sluggishly at times. It's having trouble with the cursor right key. Sometimes it responds, sometimes it doesn't respond. Usually if I press it down hard for a brief amount of time it responds. So this seems like a hardware issue with the remote. Or maybe there's a piece of dirt in there messing up the connection.
I was going to call tech support to see if I could get (another) replacement. This is a replacement already. Or is it the second replacement? But it seemed to be getting better as it started responding with less pressure.
I decided to try to open up the remote. There are four screws you can access which I manged to unscrew with a small screwdriver. But after I removed the screws, I couldn't figure out how to pry open the case. Maybe there's a hidden screw or two somewhere. Never mind. I didn't want to make it worse anyway.
In the meantime, I had paired the Fire Stick remote to it. I must have paired it earlier, but I guess it forgot. Or maybe the unit had been sitting so long that it lost all the settings. It seemed to work fine with the Fire Stick remote, though of course no voice. (I had a little fun asking Alexa with the voice remote.)
So other than that it works pretty well. I especially like the captions on hulu which are customizable. I prefer the Netflix captions on the Apple TV and the Roku, but it's mostly tolerable. ESPN seems to buffer more often and die more quickly than on the other devices.
Fibbage worked mostly OK, but had trouble on my cousin's daughters phone connecting to my router. When she connected to her own wi-fi, it was better.
Another plus for the Fire TV, is that it now supports CBS All Access even though it was supposed to work only on the new Fire TV, so apparently the system software got updated. CBS All Access seemed to work mostly OK, though the captions were a little larger than I like. Or too small, since the size is customizable. The other noticeable new app was Playstation Vue but I think my internet service is too slow to run it properly. I don't know, I never tried. And I see Disney Movies Anywhere, but since I have only one movie on it so far, I never installed it.
The next day I got invited to their place, so I was thinking to bring the Fire TV stick. So let's hook that up. Unlike the Fire TV, it didn't find the remote automatically. After a restart, I tried pressing down the home button and it finally got recognized. Then I had to connect the network.
I noticed PlayStation Vue was on the app list, but no CBS All Access. That's a major minus.
And I noticed Hulu was behaving oddly. I had noticed some strange non-responsive behavior for Hulu on the Fire TV also, but I uninstalled it and removed it from Cloud and installed it again, and it worked OK after that. I tried that on the Fire TV stick, but it's still behaving oddly.
It seems to be lagging one key press behind. So I had a heck of a time logging in. Once in, the screen went blank and when I managed to get something on the screen I didn't know what was going on due to the keypress lag. Apparently other people were having problems with the Hulu app, but these reviews were months and years ago, so you would think they would have fixed these issues. I don't remember having these problems running the first time I used the Fire Stick. Since I use Hulu and CBS as two of my main apps, I guess I won't be using the Fire TV stick any more. $25 down the drain. Well not totally, as I can use the remote instead of the (already replaced twice) Fire TV voice remote. This doesn't say much for the quality of Amazon's products.
Let's try this to try to get Hulu working correctly. Clear data, clear cache. Try again. Nope still a keypress behind. Clear data, clear cache, uninstall, unplug Fire TV. Plug back in. Reinstall Hulu. Nope, same problem.
OK let's check for system update. There's one available. Uninstall Hulu again and remove from cloud. Update system. It says it'll take about 10 minutes. Wait. Optimizing system and applications.
OK got a new screen saying there's a new section called My Videos and Alexa is available on the Fire TV. Checking the system it says it's Fire OS 5.0.5. But going to system update, it says an update (5.0.5.1) is available. Shall I update. Well, let me see how Hulu is now.
Hey, let's try to pair the voice remote. It didn't work the first time. But after a couple tries it worked. And the voice feature works on the Fire TV. And CBS All Access appears! OK, things are looking up a bit.
Hulu? Yay it works now! Change caption text color to white, change font to monospace sans serif. I'm all set. OK, I guess I just needed to update the system software. I'll leave the 5.0.5.1 for later since it's working now.
*** 5/18/16
finally decided to call Amazon support about my remote control problem (click on Help, Device Support, then the Contact Us button on the left, sign in with your password, What Can We Help You with: Fire and Kindle, select my Fire TV, issue details: I'm having trouble with my remote or game controller, additional details: my remote is not responding, then scroll down and click on phone, right after that my phone rang).
A nice woman with an Indian accent talked me through the normal troubleshooting procedures. Did you change the battery? Did you try holding the home button down? Etc. So clearly she didn't understand the problem. After answering that I had tried all of the above, I got put on hold while she tried to look up my account. My "problem" is that I didn't buy the Fire TV online but rather from the local Best Buy, so they couldn't find my purchase online. I think she further discussed my problem with her supervisor and they might have seen all my recent purchases from Amazon. After more waiting, they finally decided to give me a courtesy credit of $29.95 so I could buy a new remote. So I wouldn't even have to return the old one.
Good deal! But since my voice remote still mostly works (it's just annoying that I have to press hard on the right cursor sometimes) I might wind up using the courtesy credit for something else. Or I could just buy a non voice remote for $14.99 and have $15 left over. I don't really use the voice that often, though it's kind of cool I guess. I guess that's how Amazon keeps their customers. So thumbs up to Amazon.com for their customer service.
No comments:
Post a Comment