FireTV Stick

10-04-2025

Hello cool people! On today's episode (or really last week but I've been really busy) of how can I waste time: I mess with an old Gen 2 FireTV stick! I ran across it digging around in my bins of cables and other nonsense and figured: I can break this further.

After getting it hooked up to my monitor and booted it up to (drumroll please): a LineageOS splash screen. Yep. I already replaced the rom on it at some point, which makes my life so much easier. Just for good measure though, I figure I should update LineageOS anyway just to be safe. Easy enough, I just do adb reboot recovery to get to TWRP, then adb push (name).zip /sdcard/, then open an ADB shell in /sdcard/, I can run twrp install (name).zip. Up to date! Awesome. Now to update Magisk. So I rebooted into the OS, opened up Magisk, and pressed update. This bricked it, beacuse yes, why not.

Thank goodness it was a soft brick though, all I had to do was short the CLK pin to GND to put it into bootrom mode as documented on the XDA forums here, before simply reinstalling Lineage. I'll save explaning exactly what that forum page explained and just skip to my custom setup. I installed the following applications: (all avaliable on GitHub for free!)

• SmartTube (YouTube client)
• VLC (media player)
• RetroArch (emulator for varyous retro consoles)
• LeanbackOnFire (replacment launcher thats SO much faster and cleaner)
• Moonlight (open source implementation of NVIDIA's GameStream for playing games from my PC on the stick)
• S0undTV (Twitch client)
• Magisk (for root control)
• DTVFree (simple web browser)

And now I have a pretty cool lil streaming stick for whenever (hotels and stuff)! I wish I could get the factory remote to work but alas, it seems to only work with Fire TV OS. Until next time- make something cool!