The Amazon Fire TV Recast DVR may not be much to look at, yet the new entrant appears somewhat hackable as AFTVNews has just documented how to offload recordings. Of course, there are tons of reasons why you might want to do this — such as overcoming Amazon ecosystem lock-in, facilitate offline viewing, or to allow something like Plex to manage your entire video library.
Unfortunately, it’s early days and you have to physically remove the hard drive to get to the (full resolution!) files and it doesn’t appear Plex can assemble or index the encrypted content out-of-the box. Both TiVo and Tablo do this much better. Perhaps we’ll see some sort of programmatic way to ultimately improve the Recast process. Even better would be network access, although AFTVNews does indicate external storage will be coming to the Recast… which would somewhat simplify the current situation.
Related, Elias suspects we’ll be able to swap in a larger internal drive pretty easily. He should be testing that real soon. That’s probably the more meaningful short-term news, if it pans out.
I’m not in the Amazon fire ecosystem but this sounds interesting. If you can keep us updated for any other hacks for DVR or recording on other streaming devices/apps, Dave, that’d be great.
Well… what are you trying to do? HDHomeRun tuner hardware paired with HDHomeRun DVR service, Plex, or Channels gives you a lot of flexibility for moving content around. This may be overkill (and not inexpensive), but here’s how my buddy Adam slices and dices content for viewing around the home and beyond:
https://zatznotfunny.com/2018-12/power-user-cord-cutting/
I would think the majority of people, from my own personal experience, are trying to achieve 0 ZERO fees after purchase, along with a reasonable purchase price. Further the vast majority of so-called cord cutters are not power users, so for them the less than power user device like the Amazon recast DVR is exactly what they’re for. Those people may be well aware that an Amazon fire recast DVR may be inferior to a TiVo or the other more expensive options with their monthly or All In FEES, but they don’t care because they’re looking at the price and the device that will give them what they want adequately. In other words, people are looking for a Chevy they can afford that will get them from point A to point B with no extra cost frills, not a Cadillac they either can’t afford a refuse to pay the higher price to get from A to B in the most luxurious way possible. Southwest airlines passengers compared to first class passengers on the major airlines. The masses don’t care if the OTA video is re-encoded at 720P. As long as the device does what it does has no extra fees and looks good enough on their televisions and certainly their mobile devices they don’t care about anything else. Certainly people who care about such details will always be willing to pay the more expensive option, but they are the few. Amazon recast DVR is for everyone else, especially those cheap cheap show called cord cutters.
People want a Chevy price and then complain when it’s not a Cadillac. The cloud will make this all this moot anyway. Free dvr service w/ ads might be the future. OTA will cease to be a factor.