Quote:
Originally Posted by Molt de Renou
What doesn´t work, the Amazon Fire Stick or the laptop ?
According to the comments published below the article about the Firestick, the best one to use is the Google Chromecast.
There are also special WiFi dongles for Samsung TV´s
I can envisage a trip to Media Markt sooner than later.
Molt
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We have both the Amazon Firestick and the Google Chromecast which work fine in the UK. They are not the same and do different things.
When we took them to Mallorca - using the Amazon firestick it doesn't allow BBC channels and Amazon is not available even by using a browser. It is out of territory.
The Google Chromecast is only a casting device which allows what is played on a tablet to be played on a TV via wifi. However as I said before, not everything can be cast, only certain items. In the UK BBC iplayer can be cast from a tablet, but in Mallorca and using the same tablet it doesn't work. We can get iplayer on the tablet by going through an VPN. Our solution there is to use a long HDMI cable with a converter for the tablet (ipad).
Only the older smart TVs need a dongle and then you need to be very careful to make sure you have the right one as the dongle is specific to the model of TV. (I know because we bought the wrong one).
The latest smart TVs shouldn't need a dongle
To complete the story we also have a slingplayer which we connect to our sky box in the UK. We can then access everything on the skybox via a laptop/tablet in Mallorca. ( we then connect to the TV via a long HDMI cable) That way we can get all our channels including BBC and the pay channels on Sky. This seems the ideal solution, however we got a lot of buffering and pixelation with our 2Mb broadband. When we upgrade to the new fibreoptic in Mallorca it should be much better. However the connections from the slingbox to the sky box are only with video cables, not HDMI and therefore the picture quality will never be great. They do not currently produce a slingbox with HDMI connections. There is also a couple of seconds time lag in controlling the skybox which can be frustrating. The concept is good, but it needs developing.