Quote:
Originally Posted by frahse
I put movies/videos/picures on flash drives for several reasons. It would be a useful aside if the FireStick could handle them without me having to move them to the cloud, etc.
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Oh, I understand the reasoning for storing media on flashdrives and usb sticks--and for wanting streaming devices to be able to access them. I just think it's a little unrealistic to expect to be able to plug a usb drive into a streaming stick that's not much bigger than a usb drive in the first place. The regular Fire TV unit and other "box"-type streamers... sure. But where space is at an all-time premium, it's not likely that i/o hardware for accessing peripheral media is going to happen.
And even the units that CAN access external drives are typically hamstrung by whatever audio/video codecs the hardware has chosen to support. Meaning people are constantly converting their libraries so the latest and greatest toys can natively play them. That's why media servers that can transcode on the fly and stream to an accompanying client app have become so popular.