Plex is a great media player for Amazon Fire TV and TV Stick. It’s easy to use and has a lot of features, including support for streaming content from your computer or phone. Plex also works with many other devices, such as the Xbox One and Playstation 4. To use Plex on your Amazon Fire TV or TV Stick, first make sure you have the latest version of the Plex app installed. If you don’t have it, you can download it here. Once you have the app installed, open it and click on the “Add device” button to add your Amazon Fire TV or TV Stick. Once your device is added,Plex will start up automatically and will show you a list of devices that it can play content from. You can either select one of these devices to play content from, or you can click on the “Browse” button to search for content by title, channel, or genre. If you want to watch something specific that’s not in the list of devices that Plex has available for playing content, you can click on the “Watch Now” button next to each item in the list andPlex will start playing that item right away. You can also control playback by clicking on “Stop,” “Reverse,” or " Forward." If you want to add more devices to your Plex account, just click on the “Add Device” button again and select one of those devices from the list. You’ll be able to add other devices using their corresponding buttons in the same way as above.
Have a Fire TV or Fire TV Stick you’re not getting much use out of? Now’s the time to dust them off and turn them into a cheap, compact Plex device.
The Fire TV and Fire TV Stick have long seemed like a powerful tool in want of something to do. The Fire TV and Fire TV Stick have pretty decent hardware (especially for the time of their release) but it’s far too difficult to get local video files on your Fire TV without resorting to using an Android developer kit and some tricks to install third-party apps like Kodi Media Center.
Rather than jump through those hoops, however, you can now tap into your local media using Plex Media Sever. And if you’re already using Plex, you’ll benefit from the great unified Plex experience that you get on all your other devices including your computer, mobile devices, and everywhere else Plex is supported.
What You Need
To follow along with today’s tutorial, you only need a few things. First and foremost, you need to already be running Plex Media Server with your media setup and ready to go. If you’re new to the Plex game, because sure to check out our tutorial on setting up the Plex Media Server for the first time as well as how to keep your Plex media library up to date.
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Along with a ready-to-go Plex Media Server, you also will need a a Fire TV or Fire TV Stick—it doesn’t matter which generation of the product you use. We’ve used Plex successfully on even the first generation stick, but if you have both on hand, the extra processing power makes the Fire TV a better choice.
How to Install the Plex Client on Your Fire TV
To get started with Plex on your Fire TV, simply fire up your device and select the “Search” menu at the top of the left hand navigation bar.
Search for Plex (it’ll be the first result), and select it.
Within the app menu, click “Download”.
After the app is downloaded and installed, click “Open” to launch it and begin the login and configuration process. The first step is to configure the overscan settings, which you do via the arrow keys on your Fire remote. Adjust the display so that the arrows are all visible and the click “Accept”.
Once you calibrate your screen, you’ll be prompted to log in. Select “Sign in.”
An on-screen PIN will be displayed; enter it at plex.tv/link to link your Plex client to your account. Once linked, you’ll immediately be kicked into the main Plex interface, as seen below.
RELATED: How to Stream TV on Your Plex Media Center with Plex Channels
Here you can browse your libraries (seen here as “Kids Movies”, “Kids Shows”, “Movies” and “TV Shows”, but your library names may vary) as well as browse your channels. If you’ve never used the Plex channels feature before, you’re missing out—read up here on how to install and watch streaming channels.
Troubleshooting Playback
The default settings on the Fire TV Plex client are the ideal ones, and you should only modify them if you’re having issues. To access the settings select your username on the main Plex screen and click it, select “Settings” in the drop down menu.
Within the settings menu, navigate to the “Video” section. There are a few tweaks here we can make that can help either resolve or at least isolate issues you’re having. If you’re having general playback issues where it seems like nothing plays without stuttering (and you’ve ruled out weak Wi-Fi), you can change the “Local Quality” to a lower setting. By default it plays in the original resolution of the video but you can dial it down to, say 4 Mbps / 720p and you should see improvement–note that typically, most users will only need to dial down the quality for the Fire TV Stick and not the Fire TV.
Another trick you can try, which is helpful in ruling out whether or not the format of the media server file is the culprit, is to disable “Allow Direct Play” and “Allow Direct Stream” to see if that makes a difference. Both of these settings are, under normal conditions, highly beneficial as they allow for the files to play directly on your device without any CPU-heavy transcoding on the server side. (You can read more about these settings in the Plex wiki here.)
RELATED: How to Optimize Your Movies and TV Shows For Smooth Plex Playback
If unchecking them allows your content to play without a problem, then perhaps that’s a feasible solution. If the extra transcoding burden is too much for your server, you may wish to pre-optimize your media for smoother playback so your server doesn’t have to do the heavy transcoding on-the-fly. If you do opt to pre-optimize your media, be sure to turn the Direct Play and Direct Stream back on.
The Fire TV and Fire TV Stick might be the underdogs in the streaming platform world (and, perhaps, rightfully so) but with the addition of Plex you can blow the dust off your old devices and get more miles out of them.
