Hidden Tips and Tricks For Your AMAZON FIRE TV STICK!

so you bought an amazon firetv stick and you're using it for streaming but did you know that there are a ton of hidden features and hidden settings and hidden capabilities that you can use those devices for much much more hello Automator x' thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by helping you extend the fire TV experience we are going to go well beyond what most people use their fire TV for some of these things you will know some of these things you won't but as we go throughout the video I'm going to get more and more complex and you're probably going to have to refer to a couple of different resources that I will leave down below one of the first things to deal with are just a few settings and the first one the very first one that I think you should have a look at are the privacy settings inside of your Amazon fire TV stick now when you go into these settings you can actually turn off a couple of different tracking methods that Amazon is is using to gather data and to market to you in a couple of different ways one of the things I don't love is turning on the system and then pressing down once on the remote and suddenly I have a video preview with a lot of audio now I have my system connected to a home theater setup so it can be very loud when that happens this is actually a setting you can turn off as well so go ahead turn off the audio and video preview Amazon's little voice assistant enabled remote that they give you is very powerful very good easy to control the system with but also very easy to misplace and if you have well you can actually use your smart phone to control the entire system now you have to go and download the Amazon fire TV application and then it will basically enable you to pair with your fire TV and control it through your smart phone and it's actually a really good interface to control it with as well now if you happen to lose that voice assistant remote a good idea this is something actually one of our patrons here on automate your life did is they put a little tile sticker on it makes it a little bumpy it makes a little bulkier but then you can actually ring that device in order to find it the other thing about those remotes that can help you extend your smart home in general is because it's a Bluetooth remote it can pair to some other systems namely the Amazon or the Nvidia shield and the Apple TV boxes can be paired and use those remotes and specifically with that Apple TV box that is a great replacement to do I hate apples remote customizing the look and feel of your fire TV experience isn't really something you can do a lot of but you can actually put photos on there and have them become your screensaver now I'm going to leave a link down below to a quick tutorial that will show you how to do this but it is relatively simple you upload your photos to Amazon photos because a lot of us are subscribers to Amazon Prime if we have this device well we have the unlimited photo option and therefore can put up a number of different photos and get them to be displayed in different ways as the screensaver whenever we're away from the TV for a bit if you've set up your fire TV stick or fire TV cube then you have an Amazon account and because of that you can actually log in to their Amazon voice assistant account now I'm not saying the name because that triggers everybody's smart speakers and displays but what that means is you can connect a number of smart home cameras so not just this wise cam that is sitting here but you can also connect things like blink or I have a UV video doorbell that I can connect as well and all of those can be brought up with Amazon's voice assistant on the screen of your fire TV so what you just saw there was me just asking the video doorbell to come up and because I haven't named in that voice assistant application on my phone because I have it named doorbell I can just ask for the doorbell to be brought up and it's there on screen relatively quickly it kind of depends on your network speaking of smart home cameras you can actually install an application called tiny I'm Pro and this is a four dollar application but once you have that installed you can look at many smart home cameras at the same time we have a tutorial down below that will show you how to do this one other product that I've used and has been remarkable for me and integrates really really well with the Amazon echo series of products as well as your fire TV devices is smart dry now this is a dryer sensor that you stick inside your dryer and it it's a magnet that sticks against the dryer and it goes around with your clothes it's really amazing at detecting when your clothes are dry and or when the dryer has stopped and it will give you both of those notifications not just on echo shows on fire TVs and on echoes it'll sit there and you'll see a little spinning yellow light but it's really great on the fire TV device because you get it down in the bottom right corner if you're just allowing notifications to come in this is a great way to know as you're watching content that your laundry is done time to get up for a little bit and deal with something e you can also look at that home theater setup and I think this becomes a really important component of the overall fire TV experience and you really just need one Amazon echo sleep speaker in order to kind of start heading down this path now what you need to understand is the biggest system you can get is a two point one system and the two speakers have to be identical if you're creating a 2.0 or that two point one the other component or that point one feature is actually from an Amazon echo sub which you can still buy on amazon.com so you can look at that and that's kind of the setup I have is to echo speakers and the sub behind it and that creates a 2.1 speaker experience that is very powerful sounds great I really enjoy the setup and it creates an actual cinematic kind of experience now it's not for pure audio files don't get me wrong it's not the perfect setup but it will work for 95% people in the world today and it extends the experience in a number of other ways see you can then use an Amazon echo speaker which has a much better microphone than say a fire TV cube and you won't always have to be holding the remote to control the interface with your voice so I often times turn on and off the entire TV system using my voice I will pause I will raise volume I'll do those kinds of basic controls you can also run searches in order to find the content you're after from all the different applications on your fire TV device play Brooklyn nine-nine on Netflix getting Brooklyn nine-nine from fire TV look a Rihanna concerts a pretty big swing man you'll also see all those notifications that we talked about from a device like smart dryer package delivery notifications on the system if you allow notifications to come up on-screen now the other thing about this is you might not realize but you can actually use your TV as a speaker and the way you can do this is through downloading the Amazon music application and because again lots of us our prime subscribers we're going to have access to Amazon music here on this and in that home theater setup you're playing music through Amazon music on your fire TV through a physical remote control interface or your smart phone you're able to play it out of all those speakers and your TV and have a great experience you probably didn't know this but if you hold the home button you actually bring up a little menu on the screen there and you have four different options within that menu including the ability to put the device immediately to sleep and to look at the settings so this gets you to the settings very quickly if you head into the apps section of that menu you will actually be able to rearrange and find all of the different applications that you have installed in that menu as well is the ability to screen mirror now this works really well with Samsung Smart View on their smart phones and their tablets now with a pixel device or with other Android phones you might need to go a little bit deeper and get an application called err screen and the same holds true with iPhones and iPads you can actually download that on the fire TV and on the Android or iPhone device that you have and then you'll be able to pair those two systems together and mirror your screen really easily but if you have that Samsung smartphone or tablet with Smart View on it it works with these kinds of systems really well to cast your screen to it immediately when you run into problems with apps on the fire TV well it can be a little bit frustrating but if you know how to deal it it's actually a really quick problem to solve see sometimes I'll go into Netflix and it won't be playing right or it won't start a show for me and I've had a couple of these app issues where I just need to restart the app so then I hit the home button I go back to the menu and then I go back into the app and oh it's still at the same spot I still have the same problem oftentimes you guys will reboot then this is what I hear is people fully reboot you don't need to do that you can go into the settings and actually find your list of applications and then find the application that is misbehaving and choose for stop and this is a very common thing with Android systems which is the back end of the Amazon fire TV system it's an Android system so you know you just force stop that application and then you can go reopen it and everything should be great there are some great tutorials that I'm about to show you for playing a ton of retro video games and just play a ton of video games in general on your fire TV system but there's actually a really easy way to number one control the system and start playing games that Amazon already has in their App Store and it's right here this is a PlayStation 4 controller it's a little bit on the expensive side in terms of controllers but it is actually remarkably easy to pair with the system and then the control interface is instant and makes sense to not only to your mind but to your hand like you know which buttons kind of depress in order to do things and the video games then become playable and this is something that I find my little guy here he loves to do so I just leave this sitting in front of the fire TV device he asks Amazon's voice assistant to turn it on and then he can control with this just by turning on this controller because it's been paired so it will repair every time and then he can sit and enjoy some of those games now in terms of those much deeper game systems there are some things you need to know there's a great video from tech doctor UK who shows you how to use something called panda helper in order to kind of side load Haitians and and different games on to this system and that's one of the ways that you can go and get different games but what I found with that method and through a number of these side-loaded app stores and and different things like that they don't often work and they often require a special interface to control and you can't navigate the app stores very well it just becomes a little painful and so what I actually think is a much better way to go about things is two applications that are really easy actually to load number one you're going to get apps to fire and this is an application that's been talked about many times in many different tutorials but it's really great because what it allows you to do is push applications to your fire TV but also push files to your TV and this is one of the great ways that Paul Hibbert actually showed a tutorial to play retro games so I'll link to Paul's video down below but what he's using is apps to fire and retro arch or retro arc or I don't know how to say that actually but it's one of those and Paul does it in about five minutes on one of his tutorials so that link is down below now what you would need is a number of roms and so those are actually the video games and by the way you are stealing and it's not really allowed so keep that in mind when you do that kind of thing but you can do it and then again you have this interface now the other way that I manage all of this is to actually get a mouse pointer on screen that has helped me in the past use that panda helper method to kind of sideload applications but it has also just helped me navigate some of these apps that I've pushed from apps to fire if I wasn't able to navigate them very well with the remote that most application was actually called Mouse toggle for fire TV now this is something you can get downloaded onto your fire TV very powerful but I actually had to load it on to the fire TV and then also on to my phone in order to really get it to work right so that was a capability that I was a to do through that pan to help her so really complex stuff here and I'll leave the resources down below so you can kind of follow step by step in how to execute these kinds of things when we talked about the games I didn't talk about Bluetooth connection to devices like this so this is a bose QC 35 to actually series of headphones you can go ahead and connect things like this and bluetooth sound bars as well to your Amazon fire TV device so that's just through the Bluetooth connectivity process the same process you really used with this but then you have to follow the device's methodology for connecting to bluetooth but you can do that in a lot of cases now as you go and you install things like games and bigger applications onto your fire TV device well you're probably going to run into a few issues in terms of storage now the fire TV cube actually has more storage that's one of the reasons to go up to that but you can use a special adapter so this is just a micro USB adapter to a open or a female USB and then you can use little USB keys or USB sticks and/or adapters like this that have the SD cards and that gives you extra access to storage but what you will need for an application with that is called ES File Manager that file manager will allow you to access these other storage spaces it also allows you to access the full storage space on your amazon firetv device but it allows you to get to these kinds of external ones remove things add things drop things on and then you can also be moving this kind of a thing back and forth between devices and loading a lot of files on very quickly so I really hope this has helped you extend your fire TV stick I think there's a ton of different things that you can do with that device and they are one of the more powerful smart home gadgets that we get to play with here on automate your life now if you'd like to see more things within the Amazon ecosystem because these devices interface really well with that fireteam and they can do a ton for you go check out our reviews and our tutorials that are up on screen about Amazon's smart home system otherwise guys thanks for watching and of course don't hate automate

Channel: Automate Your Life

Views: 1,901,766

Keywords: amazon fire tv stick, fire tv stick, amazon fire stick, fire tv stick hidden features, fire tv cube hidden features, tips firestick, 10 firestick tips and tricks, amazon fire stick features, fire tv tips tricks, amazon fire tv tips, fire tv tips and tricks, amazon fire tv stick bluetooth headphones, fire tv stick 4k, fire tv cube, fire tv cube 2020, fire tv stick 2020, fire tv stick features, fire stick features, firestick remote features, automate your life, alexa

Id: 6nHpIRGCLd8

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020