Quote:
Originally Posted by WillysJeepMan
That implies that the additional processing power can made a difference. Looking at the Roku 3 and AppleTV neither of those suffer from the lower hardware specs. In other words, they could quadruple the hardware performance and it wouldn't change the playback performance/quality. In the future with 4K video? Sure. But with today's streaming source files, no benefits under most use cases.
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The FireTV's hardware is nothing to impress; at $99 I wouldn't expect it to be. Since in my experience current streaming players have room to grow when it comes to speed/smoothness of the operating system, the FireTV's hardware does not need be impressive for me to consider it, it just needs to be better than the others. It may very well turn out to suck or be no better than the Roku overall, and if so I'm glad to pick up a Roku 4.
I only suspect that the hardware will have a noticeable impact on load times, interface responsiveness, forwarding/reversing through video, and search speed. A lot of that is going to depend on how good of a job Amazon did with the software, but software can be patched. If those things are no better than on a Roku/Apple TV..well that's Amazon's problem, ha. Which is why I'm just speculating here and not throwing my money at it. I'm guessing that the voice control may be useful, but that's more of a wild card.
I don't expect video image quality will be any better than it is when streamed through the "Smart-TV" features built into an HDTV or disc player. But that isn't what these little dedicated streamers have to offer: they're about the OS, and to a large extent their content selection, which seems give-and-take right now.