Working with the Built-in Receiver on the Fire TV Platform
The Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick have a built-in receiver application that supports Amazon Fling service. This means your controller app can send supported media content over to the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick without the need for a specific companion Fire TV application.
Your controller application can discover the Fire TV or Fire TV Stick using the publically available unique service identifier (SID) of the built-in receiver and send media content to it.
This page describes how you can achieve that and what you can do with this built-in receiver.
Discovering the Built-in Receiver
The built-in receivers on the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick are identified by the service identifier (SID) "amzn.thin.pl".
To discover these receivers, you can use the following code snippets to search:
On Android/Fire OS
mController = new DiscoveryController(this);
mController.start("amzn.thin.pl", mDiscoveryListener);
On iOS
mController = [DiscoveryController alloc];
[mController open:@"amzn.thin.pl" : self];
Playing Media Content on the Built-in Receiver
The built-in receiver on the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick provides a rich set of features to your controller app.
You can do the following:
- Send video clips, audio clips, as well as images
- If your app provides closed captioning for video content, closed captioning may be displayed on the Amazon Fire TV
- Show title and description of the media clips
- Show album art when playing audio
- Control how the end of playback is handled, in case you want to send media clips continuously
Supported Media Types
The built-in receiver on the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick can play any media type supported by the Fire TV platform. The detailed list of content types is available here: Fire TV Device Specifications.
How to Control Playback?
The setMediaSource API allows you to control how the playback works on the built-in receiver. The metadataJson parameter of this API is responsible for setting values for UI elements on the playback interface.
Format of the Metadata JSON
In your controller application, please send the metadata JSON string that conforms to the following format:
{
"type" : string, // required (if not present, video is assumed)
"title" : string, // optional
"description" : string, // optional
"poster" : string, // optional – URL of the album art for an audio media source
"tracks" : // optional – subtitles presented to the user
[ // Array of subtitle objects
{
"src" : string, // required – URL of the WebVTT file
"kind" : string, // required – always "subtitles"
"srclang" : string, // required – language code
"label" : string // required – what is shown on the UI
}, …
],
"noreplay": true|false, //optional
}
Last updated: Jan 01, 2017