I have a first-gen Roku box in the bedroom and never cared much for it. It's a bandwidth hog. For that reason, I'm a little leery of the Amazon Firestick. I haven't really had a chance to read much on the Chromecast yet. Anyone use any of these, or something other than else?
Watch streaming media like Netflix and Prime off of the wifi, which is both 2.4 and 5 GHz now. I have read that the Firestick likes to hunt for and dl/buffer content that it predicts you will like via some program or protocol called "ASAP" that can't be disabled, which means to avoid the bw usage you have to disconnect it. That sounds even worse than the Roku, which simply uses aggressive buffering. You can tweak the Roku bw settings at least a little bit, but I'd still like something more tame.
I had the first gen Chromecast and overall it was great when it worked and didn't fight with my router. It would lose it's connection to the router so I had to reboot the router to get it to get a DHCP lease again. Never figured out if it was the TV (Vizio 42") router (Comcast POS) or the Chromecast itself. Whatever it was I tried many many many router configs and it never changed. Got a replacement router and same thing. Broke up with the Ex and left all that shit there. Having an XB1 I really don't need one anymore so I cant tell you if the newer gens are better or not.
Amazon is adding a Prime app to the new AppleTVs in the next few weeks. It's great for streaming, hopefully the next OS update fixes the lag as the processor is overpowered for what it does.
I have used: -Chromecast -Nexus Player Recently just upgraded to the Nvidia Shield TV box. Chromecast was good but I had issues with dropping connection to it, so it would continue to stream, but I couldn't control it. It required a power down, power up, and away we went again. Didn't happen often, but when it did, it was annoying. Note that if you want to do Kodi, it doesn't support casting. Nexus Player is a good base box, that has some extras (ie. gameplay). It did netflix, kodi, plex...and that's the extent of abilities in Canada. ;-) It was great for everything. Then I just got the Shield. Wow. Nexus Player on steroids. Streams games from my PC, the streaming service from nvidia works great (kids are just loving it) and streaming everything is so quick for video.
