I am living in SE Asia and wanted to get IPTV for me and my friends to watch. As theyre not very tech savvy, I thought an Amazon Fire Stick would be the easiest to use.
I bought a reseller account from an IPTV provider so it worked out cheaper per user and tested it on my PC using Bluestacks and on my cheap Samsung phone, using StbEmu on both. Both played the channels with little or no problem.
I ordered a load of fire sticks and added StbEmu on the stick but found that only the SD channels would play properly. The HD and FHD channels would buffer constantly making them unwatchable. It buffers for 2-3 seconds every 5-10 seconds on HD and FHD channels on the Fire Stick.
This is what I saw when testing devices:
*Win 7 Gaming PC using BlueStacks: SD, HD & FHD played fine. Minor buffering every 15-30mins at most with HD & FHD.
*Samsung Tab 4: SD, HD & FHD played fine. Minor buffering every 15-30mins at most with HD & FHD.
*Amazon Fire Stick: SD played fine. HD and FHD buffered for 2-3 seconds every 5-10 seconds, making it unwatchable.
The odd thing is that with all devices in the same house, on the same connection. My PC uses ethernet, so I tended to test with my phone and Fire Stick so I could try to draw a direct comparison. But I got stuck as the only difference seems to be the hardware (phone vs fire stick). However, the fire stick is given priority by the router, but still has issues.
I dont have a TV and have been testing the fire stick with no sound as I plugged it into a HDMI to DVI converter so I could use a monitor.
I took a fire stick over to my friends house and added an IPTV package to his Devant TV using the SS IPTV app. The TV played the HD channels with little issue, but again the fire stick was unwatchable.
This is what I have checked so far:
*Speed test: Fire stick gets 16-18Mbps which is the same as other devices I am testing.
*Use other apps: Same results.
*Changed DNS to Cloudflare (as our IPTV provider uses cloudflare): Same results.
*Set Fire Stick to have QOS priority on the router: Same results.
My friend in the UK also uses a fire stick and has an account from our reseller account and he has no issues with HD and FHD, but then again, I dont have any issues with HD and FHD that would make it unwatchable when using devices other than the fire stick.
Does anyone have any idea what the issue could be? Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.