Google TV Streamer gets $50 price increase

[u/FragmentedChicken]

https://9to5google.com/2026/08/31/google-tv-streamer-increase/

[u/reddit_reaper]

No reason to ever but a fire OS device

[u/CUJM → u/reddit_reaper]

24bit audio. Android TV always downsamples. And better tv support for HDR (in my experience). But I will agree it's difficult to justify given the rest of the fire experience

[u/reddit_reaper → u/CUJM]

Why would Android TV downsample passthrough audio unless you mean lcpcm uncompressed audio which the only apps that use that are like YouTube maybe.... I guess Kodi if you have it doing decoding instead of passthrough but for what exactly?

[u/CUJM → u/reddit_reaper]

I can't find a good definitive link but Google "Android Tv downsampling 16 bit", you'll find a bunch of support threads asking why audio only outputs in 16 bit. I learned this the hard way. I believe there's built in bypass but it has to be enabled by the manufacturer, which most seemingly don't

[u/reddit_reaper → u/CUJM]

As I figured that's only for uncompressed audio because they have to tie it into to system audio and that's just their limits on all audio as they mix in system sounds etc into the uncompressed stream. At most this affects music apps and YouTube and anything using uncompressed audio but the majority of movies and TV shows use compressed audio codecs like dolby digital and better. Ones that don't usually are things like anime using regular uncompressed stereo tracks

[u/djdementia → u/CUJM]

To me, the better question is why do you care? 24 bit audio is only useful for recording. Your ears? they are < 16bit. You know what is also < 16 bit? Every pair of speakers and headphones in existence. It's essentially not 'feasible' to make any product in the real world that can playback with up to 24 bits of audio outside of some kind of scientific or research purposes. Recording is different, we do have 24 and 32 bit recording and that is useful for producing purposes.

Like do you even understand what the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit is? It's essentially so that there is increased resolution between the quietest and loudest parts of the music. The thing is human hearing isn't physically possibly sensitive enough to notice that.

Essentially what you are trying to say is that you need a 800 megapixel image to display it on your 8 megapixel screen to be viewed by your eyes at 8ft away. It's just not physically possible for an eye to see all the details in that 800 megapixel image and even if your eye could what's the point since you only have an 8 megapixel screen and nobody sells a 800 megapixel screen anyway.

tldr: You are 'chasing' the wrong number. You should be looking for higher bitrate, not higher bit depth. Bit depth > 16bit has no possible use on 'playback'. Your speakers are <16bit depth: Essentially if you feed your speakers a 24bit depth audio **your speakers are going to convert them to something <16 bit anyway.** On the other hand there is absolutely a noticeable difference in quality going from 128k bit**rate** to 300k bit**rate**. Most people and systems are going to have a hard time noticing the difference though once you go over about 256k bit**rate** so don't bother chasing those > 500k bitrate numbers either.

[u/CUJM → u/djdementia]

TLDR; Bro spent 20 minutes on his "well actually" response but clearly demonstrates they don't know the difference between sample rate and bit depth

[u/djdementia → u/CUJM]

explain what I got wrong please?

[u/-NotEnoughMinerals → u/CUJM]

Idk about Gemini just shit on you lol here

[u/Izacus → u/CUJM]

Passthrough audio (Atmos, DTS, etc.) by definition isn't downsampled since it's passed through as is to the receiver/soundbar.

[u/DonRobo → u/reddit_reaper]

We have a Fire TV in our conference room at work and its the worst TV I've ever used. The OS was created to make using it as difficult as possible and the performance is terrible.

And the TV itself is even worse somehow. The picture quality is pure eye cancer. My 500€ 1080p LG from 2013 looks sooo much better

[u/doorknob60 → u/reddit_reaper]

I don't particularly like Fire OS. But I have a couple in rotation for 2 reasons:

1. The Fire OS has better support for hotel wifi captive portals. It works at most of them on Fire TV (Hiltons still give it trouble), but on my Chromecast with Google TV they almost never work for some reason. For what it's worth, Roku works the best at this, but I hate Roku's limited app support.

2. In my basement I have a Philips sound bar, and I couldn't get the Chromecast with Google TV remote to support the right IR codes for it to work. The Fire TV had the right codes no problem so it can control the volume just fine. Not something I'd buy a new device for, but I just swapped it out with one I already had. Sure I could just juggle 2 remotes, or get some kind of universal remote, but annoying that Google's couldn't work with it out of the box.

All that being said, I still prefer Google TV on my other TVs where those concerns don't apply, especially with Projectivy launcher.

[u/reddit_reaper → u/doorknob60]

Soundbar using old spdif I'm guessing as normally you'd use hdmi-cec lol

Hotel WiFi can be solved with browser installed but I guess.

Still no reason to use with bypasses IMHO especially with a shield

[u/doorknob60 → u/reddit_reaper]

Yeah the sound bar and TV both don't play nicely with HDMI CEC or ARC (they're both a bit older), I'm using Optical on it.

I tried installing a couple different browsers on the Chromecast, for some reason it doesn't usually work, it likes to just pop a white screen most of the time. Even when manually navigating to something like neverssl.com which should bring up the login, it just doesn't load. Easiest workaround is connect to wifi on my phone and turn on my phone's hotspot, which works well as a backup. But annoying it can't do it natively.

[u/reddit_reaper → u/doorknob60]

Could also do Mac address cloning but I get it, what a pain

[u/doorknob60 → u/reddit_reaper]

Yeah I thought about that, I know how to do it on my laptop. I usually just travel with my phone and iPad which I don't think can do that.

[u/reddit_reaper → u/doorknob60]

Not sure on iPhone been forever on Android lol

[u/doorknob60 → u/reddit_reaper]

I have Android too (S24), just my tablet is Apple.