UI3 on Fire TV stick shutting off?

[Jessie.slimer]

Question for anyone running UI3 on an Amazon Fire TV stick with silk browser....

Does it go into standby mode if the TV is shut off for a while?

I just received my first fire stick today so I might be missing some sleep timeout setting, but if I shut the tv off and come back to it a short while later, I have to wake up the fire stick and go back into the web browser manually. Maybe it recognizes the hdmi handshake/connection was broken and backs itself out of the browser and goes to sleep. Just a guess since I'm a noob at android sticks. Works great otherwise.

My plan was to have the stick running UI3 24/7 plugged into an older tv in the kitchen, and turn the tv on to quickly see my driveway cam when the driveway alert goes off, and possibly automate tuning it on with a logitech harmony hub down the road.

Anyone running one this way?

 

[bp2008]

I imagine it is indeed noticing the TV is off and going to sleep. You may see better results using a raspberry pi or something similar that runs a less locked-down operating system so you can have it do what you want.

 

[bradner]

Question for anyone running UI3 on an Amazon Fire TV stick with silk browser....

Does it go into standby mode if the TV is shut off for a while?

I just received my first fire stick today so I might be missing some sleep timeout setting, but if I shut the tv off and come back to it a short while later, I have to wake up the fire stick and go back into the web browser manually. Maybe it recognizes the hdmi handshake/connection was broken and backs itself out of the browser and goes to sleep. Just a guess since I'm a noob at android sticks. Works great otherwise.

My plan was to have the stick running UI3 24/7 plugged into an older tv in the kitchen, and turn the tv on to quickly see my driveway cam when the driveway alert goes off, and possibly automate tuning it on with a logitech harmony hub down the road.

Anyone running one this way?

I have BI UI3 running on two Amazon FireTV sticks successfully for many months now but never with Silk. I sideloaded Chrome on them and it runs flawlessly - 24/7 on one of the TV's. Google "Install Chrome on FireStick" and there's many instructions out there. That was the main selling feature for me to get BI - the UI3 interface. So easy now to have the cams on different TV's around the house/garage. Before I was using TinyCam Pro running on a tablet with a HDMI cable, and had to reboot every other day it seemed. The UI3 is so stable.

Cheers.

edit - about Silk, I could never get it to work properly with it. Remember to set the timeout setting to 0 to disable it also.

 

[Jessie.slimer]

That's what I was thinking too. I've been meaning to get a pi to mess around with and it seems more open sourced.

 

[Jessie.slimer]

@bradner do you notice any sluggishness or freezing of framerate on yours. I just noticed my framerates bouncing around and sometimes dropping to zero for several seconds after sitting for a while. May be the silk browser.

On your chrome browser, does it stay in chrome without backing out if the tv is off? Maybe I'll try chrome tomorrow on it.

Thanks.

 

[roaoro]

Personally, I would/do leave the TV on 24/7. Some would argue there's less "wear and tear" . I've been running 4 32"-42" LCD monitors non-stop for a few years and have had no failures.

Sent from my Lenovo YT3-850F using Tapatalk

 

[Jessie.slimer]

I actually thought about this. Not sure what the wife will think of it since it's in the kitchen though. Would make automating the turning on unnecessary.

 

[bradner]

@bradner do you notice any sluggishness or freezing of framerate on yours. I just noticed my framerates bouncing around and sometimes dropping to zero for several seconds after sitting for a while. May be the silk browser.

On your chrome browser, does it stay in chrome without backing out if the tv is off? Maybe I'll try chrome tomorrow on it.

Thanks.

Mine are stable. When BI gets updated I've had the occasional glitch and had to restart the UI3, but rock solid in comparison to using TinyCam Pro. I have very good wifi (Ubiquiti ecosystem) too with 150Mbps service overall - that may helps (I have 2 FireSticks and 3 Fire TV's in our household now with UI3 on three of the devices full time).

When I do shut the TV off while in the UI3 interface, 9/10 it goes back to the cams when it's turned back on. The odd time I just have to relaunch chrome and it goes right to the UI3 interface and auto-logs in - a 10 sec max. process.

edit: I have a 32" Fire TV on a kitchen cabinet and the wife actually admitted that she really likes it, "now that it's actually useful and not shutting off" LOL. That's when I went all in and bought more Fire TV devices. Originally the kitchen had a FireStick on a Panasonic Smart TV and I set the TV's timer to turn off at 11pm and on at 6am. The UI3 interface always came right up, that was nice. Unfortunately the FireTV's don't have that kind of timer - only sleep timers - so many times the kitchen tv just stays on 24/7.

re Silk: I could never get it running stable, so just went with chrome and never looked back.

edit: Getting the wife's "approval" of the whole idea of security cams - now that she can see them easily - has reduced the pushback on me "upgrading" most of my cameras the past 6 months or so . I let her pick the cams that she wants to see ( I have a 13 cam - and counting - setup) and created a group for them so she gets exactly what she wants.

 

[bp2008]

I let her pick the cams that she wants to see ( I have a 13 cam - and counting - setup) and created a group for them so she gets exactly what she wants.

I hope you have been optimizing the group webcast stream frame size, especially to make it decently high resolution!

 

[bradner]

I hope you have been optimizing the group webcast stream frame size, especially to make it decently high resolution!

Thank-you!! I didn't know about that. All my groups were at 5FPS max - I upped them to 15! Appreciate that info!

 

[Jessie.slimer]

Well I put chome on the fire stick and it seems to run much smoother. And I have now have direct ptz control using the Amazon's arrow keys. It's stayed loaded every time I turn the tv on so far, but found a couple of other unnecessary settings I turned off, like screen saver and hdmi cec.

Fingers crossed, but looking good.

 

[bradner]

Well I put chome on the fire stick and it seems to run much smoother. And I have now have direct ptz control using the Amazon's arrow keys. It's stayed loaded every time I turn the tv on so far, but found a couple of other unnecessary settings I turned off, like screen saver and hdmi cec.

Fingers crossed, but looking good.

Great to hear!

I also installed Mouse Toggle (can google it, quite a few sites have instructions but similar to installing Chrome). It's a bit finicky to install. There's two versions out there 1.06 and 1.11 I *think* my FireSticks worked with 1.06 and the FireTV's worked with 1.11 - can't remember off the top of my head but that just could have been my luck and maybe either version works on either device...

What that gets you is a mouse pointer when you double click one of the Fire Remote buttons. It's very useful for me because I couldn't get any Amazon mouse/arrow keys to work in the UI3 interface very well. I also bought a bluetooth tiny keyboard to control my PTZ's easier rather than pushing and holding buttons to slide a mouse cursor around the screen to the right spot.

 

[Holbs]

A 2020 Fire Stick came in today ($39). Installed Downloader, Mouse Toggle, and Chrome. Yep, installation is a tad finicky but I waded thru it. Can now see UI3 on my bedroom smart tv. Will run for a couple days to see how stable things go (haven't dabbled with any power settings, for example). This will replace the 50' HDMI cable I have running from a Blue Iris server downstairs to my upstairs smart TV.
I originally bought a RPi4 but thought I would give this a try for the $39 and possible do other magic with the RPi4

 

[Holbs]

learned really fast to disable screen saver and also to set UI3 timeout to 0 so that it never disconnected

 

[Holbs]

Question for anyone running UI3 on an Amazon Fire TV stick with silk browser....

Does it go into standby mode if the TV is shut off for a while?

I just received my first fire stick today so I might be missing some sleep timeout setting, but if I shut the tv off and come back to it a short while later, I have to wake up the fire stick and go back into the web browser manually. Maybe it recognizes the hdmi handshake/connection was broken and backs itself out of the browser and goes to sleep. Just a guess since I'm a noob at android sticks. Works great otherwise.

My plan was to have the stick running UI3 24/7 plugged into an older tv in the kitchen, and turn the tv on to quickly see my driveway cam when the driveway alert goes off, and possibly automate tuning it on with a logitech harmony hub down the road.

Anyone running one this way?

option 1 (using ADB) worked for me on latest generation of fire stick

 

[Flintstone61]

"This will replace the 50' HDMI cable I have running from a Blue Iris server downstairs to my upstairs smart tv"

50 feet? how did you do that....I thought they could only be like 5-6 feet long.

 

[Holbs]

This will replace the 50' HDMI cable I have running from a Blue Iris server downstairs to my upstairs smart tv
50 feet? how did you do that....I thought they could on be like 5-6 feet long.

science!
no idea. I thought they were short ranged too. maybe that was the HDMI v1.0 days or something.

 

[bp2008]

Plain HDMI cables max out around 50 feet in my experience and they can be thick and inflexible and sometimes not work reliably. Some of the longest HDMI cables use fiber optics to carry the high frequency signals over longer distances (hundreds of feet even) with a much thinner cable, but that adds a lot to the base cost. Example:

http://amzn.com/B07WPVF1XV

Just don't do like me and run a fiber optic HDMI cable backwards. They are not bidirectional.

 

[fenderman]

The max distance depends on the cable but also on the source. For example I have an old laptop that cannot feed A 50 foot HDMI cable to monitor Without severe image quality issues however When I connected an HDMI splitter in line it worked perfectly it has been running that way for many years. The splitter amplifies the signal a bit I’m assuming and that’s why it works.

 

[Flintstone61]

Makes me want to see if my housemates POS Nightowl would work on a 30 footer to the kitchen wall TV. Of course that creates new problems. The mouse....