HomeIf you are an Amazon Fire TV owner, you must know that you can expand the storage space of the set-top box via external microSD or USB drives. Actually, the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick were primarily designed to stream media over the internet, but they can also be used to play local video files with the support of external USB drive or SD Card. What about Amazon Fire TV supported media formats? How to watch Blu-ray/DVD movie on Amazon Fire TV? Read on to discover everything you need to know to play any movie files on Amazon Fire TV from an attached external microSD card or USB drive.
Best Media Player for Amazon Fire TV
The Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick do not have a built-in app to access video files on external storage drives. You will need to install an app to play your video files.
VLC is a free app in the Amazon Appstore for the Fire TV. It is the simplest option to play video files from external drives. It does not have any of the fancy features found in other apps like Kodi, but it gets the job done. When you launch the app, it should automatically find and list the video files stored on your external drive. If it doesn't find the files, scroll down to VLC's "Browsing" section, and select the directory associated with your device and drive.
Related topic: Install Kodi on Amazon Fire TV | Play Local Video on Fire TV with VLC via USB
Amazon Fire TV Supported File Formats
This next 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 only case where support isn't the same across devices is with H.265/HEVC, which is supported on Fire TV - 2nd Generation only.
| 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) |
How to Play Unsupported Local Video on Amazon Fire TV via USB Drive/SD Card ?
Although Amazon Fire TV can handle many video formats, these file formats including Blu-ray/DVD disc, ISO files and digital file formats including AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, MKV, FLV, XAVC/XAVC S, MXF, AVCHD, etc are imcompatible with Amazon Fire TV. To solve this problem, you need to transcode these unsupported file formats to Amazon Fire TV compatible video listed above.
Here, you can try Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate (Get Mac version). As an all-in-one media solution, the program can rip and convert all movie formats to both Fire TV - 1st Generation, Fire TV - 2nd Generation, and Fire TV Stick playable video with a resolution of 4K/2K/SD/HD.
With this Amazon Fire TV converter, you also can do some simple video editing work to enhance your video viewing experience. You can trim videos to remove unwanted parts, crop video file size to remove the black bars around the video, merge separate video clips into one, apply special color effect or add external subtitles to videos.
Then, let's begin the conversion process.
Step 1: Add unsupported video files to the program
Launch the application on your computer, click "File" > "Load Video/Audio" or "Load from Folder" to import local video files 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.
Note: If you have a 2nd-gen Amazon Fire TV, H.265 encoded files are best because they provide the best quality at the lowest file size. For maximum compatibility across all models, it's best to use H.264 encoded files.
Tip: 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 3: Start the conversion
Just click Convert Button, and you can do other things before the conversion process is completed. After that, click "Open" button to get the converted vdieo files. Then you will have no issues to play and stream any movie files to Amazon Fire TV via USB drive or SD Card. Just enjoy it!
About External Storage for Amazon Fire TV
Learn about compatible external storage options and specifications for Amazon Fire TV devices. Fire TV Stick devices do not support external storage.
| External Storage | USB Storage Specifications | MicroSD Storage Specifications |
| Component or Feature |
Amazon Fire TV (1st Generation): Access and save apps and games to a compatible USB flash drive. Open personal music, video, and photo files saved to USB storage using supported third-party apps. Amazon Fire TV (2nd Generation): Open personal music, video, and photo files stored on a compatible USB flash drive using supported third-party apps. A microSD port is available if you need extra storage space for apps and games on your Fire TV (see the section below for more information). Note: Fire TV Stick devices do not support USB or external storage. |
Amazon Fire TV (2nd Generation): Access and store apps and games to a compatible microSD card. Note: Amazon Fire TV (1st Generation) and Fire TV Stick devices do not support microSD storage. |
| Device Types |
USB flash drive Go to www.amazon.com/firetvusbstorage for a list of supported devices. USB Version: 2.0 |
microSD cards Go to www.amazon.com/firetvsdstorage for a list of supported devices. |
| Size | 128GB or smaller | 128GB or smaller |
| File Format | FAT32 | FAT32 |
| Supported Media |
Apps and Games Note:
|
Apps and Games Note:
|
| Note: FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB in size. If you want to play video files that are larger than 4GB, you have to use Pavtube to split the files. | ||
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