With Amazon's Fire TV set-top box, it has been pretty convenient for you to watch high-definition 1080p streams on Amazon Video, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu. But how about your streaming your personal media like movies and music to Amazon Fire TV?
Best media player apps for Amazon Fire TV
To play local video on Amazon Fire TV, there are a bunch of Apps that are capable of picking up video files from local network and displaying them on big screen. But in terms of overall ease-of-use, simplicity, interface design, and extra features, Plex is the clear winner. VLC for Fire TV also has the ability to pick up local files made available on a home network, and like the many other VLC applications, it offers support for all the most common file types, however, you will need to install ES File Explorer as well. Another impressive media player software is called Kodi, which provides a ton of useful functionality but is tricky to configure. To start, you will need to sideload the app onto your device and then add your computer's media library as a source to get all your content available on the Fire TV Stick.
Related topic: Install Kodi on Amazon Fire TV | Play Local Video on Fire TV with VLC via USB
Although above listed media player apps such as VLC can handle nearly all video formats, some program like VLC and Plex even have the ability to transcode incompatible file formats for you, however, as the media transcoding process is very CPU intensive and will use temporary disk storage for the converted media, if your computer CPU is not faster enough or your OS boot drive, it is not recommended to perform the transcoding process with the media player apps. There are some remarkable third-party video conversion app such as Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate for Windows/Mac (best Video Converter software) can assist you to convert any incompatible file formats including Blu-ray/DVD disc, ISO files and digital file formats including AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, MKV, FLV, H.265, XAVC/XAVC S, MXF, AVCHD, etc to Amazon Fire TV/Fire TV 2/Fire TV Stick supported media formats listed as below:
| Type | Codec | MIME type | Details | Containers |
| Video | H.263 | video/3gp | Hardware accelerated up to WVGA (800x480), 30fps, 6 Mbps, Profile 0 Level 70. | 3GPP (.3gp) MPEG-4 (.mp4) |
| H.264 | video/avc | Hardware accelerated, up to 1080p, 30 fps, 20 Mbps, High Profile up to Level 4. | 3GPP (.3gp) MPEG-4 (.mp4) MPEG-TS (.ts) |
|
| H.265 HEVC (supported on Fire TV – 2nd Gen. only) |
video/mp4 | Hardware accelerated, Main 10 Profile, Level 5.0, Color space 8-bit support, 3840x2160 @ 30 fps, 25 Mbps | MPEG-4 (.mp4) | |
| VP8 (supported on Fire TV – 2nd Gen. only) | video/webm | Hardware Accelerated, Profile 0 | WebM (.webm) | |
| VP9 (supported on Fire TV – 2nd Gen. only) | video/webm | Hardware Accelerated, Profile 0 | WebM (.webm) | |
| MPEG-4 | video/mp4v-es | Up to 1080p, 30 fps, 20 Mbps, Advanced Simple Profile Level 5. | 3GPP (.3gp) | |
| Audio | AAC-LC | audio/mp4a-latm | Up to 96 kHz, 6 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit. | 3GPP (.3gp) MPEG-4 (.mp4) M4P (.m4p) AAC (.aac) |
| HE-AACv1 (AAC+) | audio/mp4a-latm | Up to 96 kHz, 6 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit. | 3GPP (.3gp) MPEG-4 (.mp4) M4P (.m4p) AAC (.aac) |
|
| HE-AACv2 (enhanced AAC+) | audio/mp4a-latm | Up to 96 kHz, 6 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit. | 3GPP (.3gp) MPEG-4 (.mp4) M4P (.m4p) AAC (.aac) |
|
| AC3 (Dolby Digital) | audio/ac3 | Up to 48 kHz, 6 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit. | MPEG-4 (.mp4, m4a) | |
| eAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus) | audio/eac3 | Up to 48 kHz, 6 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit. | MPEG-4 (.mp4, m4a) | |
| FLAC | audio/flac | Up to 48 kHz, 2 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit (no dither for 24 bit). | FLAC (.flac) | |
| MIDI | N/A | MIDI (Type 0 and 1), DLS (Version 1 and 2), XMF, and Mobile XMF. Ringtone formats RTTTL/RTX, OTA, and iMelody. | MIDI Type 0 and 1 (.mid, .xmf, .mxmf) RTTTL/RTX (.rtttl, .rtx) OTA (.ota) iMelody (.imy) |
|
| MP3 | audio/mp3 | Up to 48 kHz, 2 channels in DSP (16-bit and 24-bit) and software (16-bit). | MP3 (.mp3) | |
| PCM/Wave | N/A | Up to 192 kHz, 6 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit. | WAV (.wave) | |
| Vorbis | audio/vorbis | Ogg (.ogg) Matroska (.mkv) |
This table describes the currently supported media formats for the Fire TV platform.
Unless otherwise noted, the media specifications in the following table apply to all devices in the Fire TV family: Fire TV - 1st Generation, Fire TV - 2nd Generation, and Fire TV Stick. (The 2nd Generation is the latest version of Fire TV). The only case where support isn't the same across devices is with H.265 HEVC, which is supported on Fire TV - 2nd Generation only.
How to Convert and Play Unsupported Local Video for Amazon Fire TV?
Step 1: Add unsupported video files to the program.
Launch the program, click the "Folder" or "Video" icon to load source video movies from your local computer to the program. For loading Blu-ray or DVD disc, click "File" > "Load from Disc" option.
Step 2: Output Best formats for Amazon Fire TV.
Tap on the "Format" bar, from its drop-down list, choose Amazon Fire TV best favorable "H.264 HD Video(*.mp4)" from "HD Video" main category menu.
Step 3: Adjust output profile parameters.
Click "Settings" to open "Profile Settings" window, here you can flexibly tweak the output video codec, resolution, bit rate, frame rate and audio codec, sample rate, bit rate and channels to achieve the best video playback effects on Amazon Fire TV.
Step 4: Start the conversion.
Go back to the main UI and click "Convert"button to start local video to Amazon Fire TV conversion process.
When the conversion is completed, you can will have no issues to play and stream local video to Amazon Fire TV via USB drive, Plex Media Server or Kodi media player.
