First impressions of Fire TV Recast:
Recast is an OTA DVR. It's useful if you have a streaming service that doesn't carry your locals, or just care about locals only. I got it because between the end of basketball season and the beginning of football, what little TV I watch is networks. So I can pause my streaming service for 4-5 months and use this to record what I watch. I get 41 stations, including all the majors, PBS, ION, and all those others that show up on subchannels. Some duplicates, and many I don't watch.
Setup was quick and easy. Connect my antenna to the back of the box, connect power, and I also connected an ethernet cable from the back of my router, though you can do wireless. It powered up, confirmed my account, and started scanning for OTA stations. It only tells me if I'm getting "good" or "poor" reception, so it's harder to position the antenna than it was with Dish, which gave me a number between about 55 and 100 for signal quality.
Instructions say that your Fire Stick/TV will find it automatically. Roku and smart TVs are not supported. I read somewhere that it's integrated with the Fire devices. Nothing you need to install.
So ... where is it? This is the first big quirk. It's integrated with the Fire Stick, rather than being an app like YTTV, Hulu, etc. So there's no app to find. Nothing on the home screen. I hunt around, and finally find it on the Live menu, at the very bottom, where there is a Channel Guide with 2 weeks displayed, ability to set Favorites, parental controls, and other settings. In my opinion, it'd be better if they just made it like other apps. It would also make it easier to be supported on a Roku and smart TVs.
Now, once you watch a station, it shows up on your home screen, just like any other app you've recently watched. But each station shows up separately. That seems good and bad. Good that I can quickly get to the stations I watch most. But if I've watched a few stations, they push other apps off the home page. TV stations also start showing up on the Live screen once you've watched them.
Recording shows is a lot like it was on Dish. You find it in the guide, click on it, and it asks if you want to record all episodes it finds, or just ones on the station/network you selected. I don't see a search option. You can do it by voice, but it also records old repeats on all those subnetworks like ION they might be found on. Maybe there's a way around that. I'm still figuring it out.
To watch recordings, it's more intuitive. You go to the DVR menu. But the first thing you see when you scroll down is "What's On Now". You have to go down one level further to see your recordings. That seems odd. If I want to watch Live TV, I'd go to the Live menu. When I go to DVR, I want to watch recordings, and not have the screen cluttered with Live options too.
Watching a recording seems fine. You can skip commercials, though it doesn't show a little box as you skip like YTTV does so it's harder to find the end of commercials. There's just a little lag to show what's on as you skip. I don't think it buffers much, if anything. I don't like this. I'm sure I'll get more used to it, but it'll be a little harder and take more time to skip commercials. I have the one with a 1TB drive, but had trouble finding how much storage I have left. Eventually I found it in the settings. I'd rather have it on the DVR page, but I guess that couldn't be integrated. What I do like compared to YTTV is that I can delete recordings I've watched, so it's easier for me to tell what is unwatched from a glance.
The picture itself is very good, just like it would be watching OTA directly, which I've always found a bit better than watching from a streamer or satellite. My understanding is that the signal is a big compressed with those.
I had a few times where the playback would cut out for a second. Not sure why. Maybe the signal isn't good enough, which is why I'd like more granularity on the signal strength when setting up stations than just "good" or "poor". In fact on Dish any time I tuned into an OTA channel it would display the signal strength number for a few seconds. I also had one time where the picture just went black, even though audio continued. Maybe that was a problem with the station itself. I switched to YTTV and all was fine, but it was a different station on the same network. I'm in a bizarre area where the locals assigned to me by Dish and the streamers come from a city I can't get with an antenna, but with an antenna I can get all the locals from a couple of cities in another direction.
So far, I'm not sold on it. If the cutting out continues, and I can't figure out why, I may return it, and just keep YTTV year round. Or if I just can't get used to all the quirky ways it does things. I'll keep using it and see how it goes.
If anyone else is a Recast user and has any tips, I'm all ears.
I've had traffic tickets, and paid a fine - not sure what that has to do with taking services you haven't paid for. Whatever your career work product was, you didn't care if people used your work without paying you anything?
, knock yourself out.
