Amazon Fire TV

The book I read to research this post was Help Me Guide To The Amazon Fire Tv by Charles Hughes which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This book is around 70 pages so is quite short. The Amazon Fire Tv is a bit like the Google Chromecast in that it streams media like tv shows and films to your television either by Amazon Prime or a 3rd party like Netflix. It is priced at £79 in Britain. Fairly recently Amazon has started to release apps specifically for this device which includes games. It has voice search which lets you search for media based on things like film name or actor name but prevents you from searching specifically for free content. It connects to a HD television via a HDMI cable not included with it but apparently you can get a compatible one on Amazon.com for just $1.90. It also connects to your wireless network normally a router to stream media. A Chromecast of course only costs $30 and if all you want to do is stream content is probably a better buy but the Fire TV has a lot of other features so is quite competitively priced. It won’t play graphically intensive games on you television which presumably would be streamed from your computer. It does though make your television a kind of Smart TV with its own operating system. There is also a Fire TV stick for those who want something similar to a Chromecast. It does also work with any cloud accounts which might have media on Amazon. Bear in mind you might need quite a fast broadband connection to stream video. I think this is a great device especially with the voice search that I certainly would be tempted to purchase. I did really enjoy reading the book and would definitely recommend it.

Google Chromecast

The book I read to research this post was Unlock The Power Of Your Chromecast by Aaron Halbert which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. If you just need to do things like watch Netflix on your Chromecast you probably don’t need but if you want to get the most out of it like using various apps and programs to add additional features or watch channels like Disney and Spotify which aren’t officially supported this book is for you. The Google Chromecast is about $35 and is a tv streaming box a bit like the Roku or Apple TV. Unlike them it uses a wireless router and computer network to do the streaming. It works with a 3D signal uses the router mostly to do the processing which frees up the processors on your television, tablet or computer. Say if you are watching YouTube on it you haven’t got to keep the app open to do that because it converts it into a TV signal leaving you to do other stuff on your computer. There are various services for the Chromecast mainly for different tv stations you can watch and some are kind of unofficial and will typically be a lower resolution than full HD. There is localhost which is free and cloud based and gives you up to 2GB to store media to play which isn’t much space you have to pay for anything additional. There is a program called handbrake which you can probably search for in Google but that lets you convert from other formats into MP4 the compatible format and that is a free program. If there is no kind of signal going to the Chromecast it will merely display a screensaver. It will stream stuff to a tablet for you to watch. This book which when I downloaded was number 1 on the computing ebook chart on kindle at the time does tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the Chromecast and does a good job of explaining it. A final thing if you do presentations and have a large HDTV you can do your presentations streamed from a laptop via the device on the television and lets face it a Chromecast is lot more mobile than a projector. I did really enjoy reading this book.