Hello! New here, but been lurking for a while. Trying to come out and participate a bit more.
I got my Kindle Fire at release and overall have been pleased. I haven't done much video with it, but used both the Netflix and Amazon Streaming services this weekend and was extremely disappointed with the play back in both. Both had momentary freezes or skips. I think I've figured out that the issue goes away when I kill a bunch of apps running in the background, but the whole "task killer" necessity issue is a matter of debate. Unfortunately it seems necessary to me.
I know that bandwidth/buffering was not the issue. In the Amazon Streamed video I could clearly see that the video was fully loaded (buffered) for streaming with but the uneven playback continued. Netflix was the same way and still had the exact same uneven playback. My home download speed is upgraded to 10mb, so I'm confident it's not bandwidth but tried it at work today with the same results...until....
I decided to see if the apps in the background were an issue, so I killed everything other than the few base things necessary. Basically, it had a couple of email programs running (I hate consolidated InBoxes), ESPN score center, AK Notepad, Accuweather, Amazon MP3 (not sure why it was running), CalenGoo, and maybe a couple of others I've forgotten. When I tried again, the video playback was perfect.
Thoughts? Do you think it might be a specific app causing the problem? Just too many things that stay running? Is performance better on the Fire with a task killer? (I know the two sides of that argument on Android.) Anyone else experience something similar? It seems that both of my main streaming apps (Amazon and Netflix) were affected in the exact same way, which I find really bizarre.
Hoping some of the incredibly smart people around here have some ideas/thoughts to share! Thanks!