[windhoek]

Having been pleasantly surprised to discover my Fire TV box - running Kodi 16.0 Jarvis - can play multichannel music in FLAC, PCM and DTS 5.1, I'm even more surprised to discover it can play stereo and multichannel DSD; both DSF and DFF formats. I tried to play music directly from an SACD ISO, but Kodi couldn't even see the file so that's a complete non-starter for the time being. But still, stereo and multichannel DSD playback through an Amazon Fire TV box running Kodi is a huge win no matter what way you look at it - especially considering the cost of the hardware comes in at a smidge under £80/$90. And what's more... wait for it... playback is gapless!

The only snag seems to be Fire TV doesn't support Hard Disk Drives via USB - at least, not ones that need to be powered by the attached device - so we're limited to Solid State USB drives for the time being; which can be costly when capacity matters most, and USB capacity isn't anywhere near as high as that of even the cheapest HDD.
 
All this might be widely known among the DSD community, but I thought I'd share it just in case it isn't 

[windhoek]

Update: it seems playback isn't always gapless as a brief click has occurred between a couple of tracks on DSOTM.

[Phil A]

Thanks for sharing.  I have a couple of fire sticks but have not tried much with them.  In the rooms I have them, I do have Oppo players and in one room I have a music server as well with JRiver.  It might be useful for upstairs where I have an old Oppo BDP-93 that has a bad network card so I have a hard drive with music and connect via the wireless Oppo dongle.

[Phil A]

Here's some detail as well - http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=106329&page=6

[windhoek]

Ah, old news, it seems. But for a small gadget like the Fire TV that's small on expense too, it's an affordable and effective option for those who don't have anything else. I still use my mac mini with JRiver for DSD playback, but if I didn't, I'd consider using one of these for sure. Come to think of it, if Koki supports DSD in principle, perhaps Kodi on a Rasberry Pi would work as well - and they're cheap as chips.

[windhoek]

Throughout the last week or so, I've been exploring Fire TV-running-Kodi's potential as a main media player. I still haven't found a solution to the whisper-quiet click that appears when playing DFF DSD files - which reminds me, the newly released Sony STR-DN1080 supports stereo and multichannel DSD playback via USB, Network and HDMI - but I've made progress as far as utilising it's potential goes in other Hi-Res ways: specifically, blu ray audio/video rips via USB.

The principal snag when it comes to playing multimedia files via USB on such a setup, as I'm sure you already know, is that Fire TV only supports flash drives in FAT32 format. This means flash drives with a storage capacity exceeding 32GB won't work because they're typically formatted in NTFS. And what's more, FAT32 has a 4GB limit in place on the size of any individual file that can be placed on a FAT32 drive, so you can't copy to a FAT32 formatted flash drive, for example, a whopping great blu ray rip such as Beyoncé by Beyoncé - the 21GB file is simply too large... or is it?

It turns out, 'EaseUS free edition' can format external storage in FAT32 - an option not natively available within Windows or OSX - so you can connect flash drives greater than 32GB loaded with content for playback via Kodi as long as it's formatted in FAT32. I haven't tried this with a 256GB USB drive, for example, but my Fire TV recognised my FAT32 formatted-64GB USB drive no problem. It might well recognise a FAT32 formatted-HDD as well, but apparently, the Fire TV doesn't spin down HDDs when not in use, so it's probably best to stick with solid state storage for the time being.

So that's the FAT32 issue sorted. As for the 4GB snag, it turns out Kodi can recognise blu ray rips archived into smaller files (using WinRAR) and pull them together again on the fly for playback. I split the 21GB blu ray Beyoncé file into 5 'archived' parts earlier and copied the folder containing them onto my flash drive and then popped the flash drive into my Fire TV for playback, and sure enough, Kodi sees the WinRar files as though they were the same, single file it is on my mac mini. As for playback, well let's just say it's flawless!

If I had lots of Blu ray videos it would make sense to work out networking, but I've only got five, six or seven at most (all music videos plus two blu ray films), so if I persevere with my Fire TV running Kodi as a video file front end, I might as well stick with playback from a flash drive for convenience and reliability as it works superbly as present. If I persevere with music playback through the same front end, I really should look into networking as I've got a helluva lot more music.

Click below to read the guide on splitting >4GB files using WinRar; I don't think there's a guide on formatting storage in FAT32 using EaseUS.
http://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-play-files-larger-than-4gb-off-the-fire-tvs-fat32-usb-storage-in-kodi/