I’m stuck with OTA free TV but my head can be turned by fire stick s of various generations and prices. What is jailbreaking? Assume l know nothing about anything… What questions do you expect me to have?
Jailbreaking has to do with locked down OS’s like iOS where you need to break the OS to load things that they don’t want you to, no need to jailbreak a Firestick, the correct term is ‘side load’, which means it’s available to you to do so but it’s your thing, not theirs, so you have to figure out how to do it. But with Youtube it’s not difficult and the device won’t fight you like it would would jailbreaking.
kanicbird is correct. Jailbreaking is a misnomer with regards to a Firestick but that’s what people call it so you may have to search for that term when you learn how to modify your device. Modifying your device to accept different content is not illegal. Using that modified device to get unauthorized content probably is.
I haven’t modified my device because I generally prefer to pay for my media. It’s against the boards rules to go into detail but it’s very easy to do and a simple Google search will get you there.
If you have a paid account for things like Amazon Prime, Netflix, HBO or Disney+, you can use your Firestick to access that over WiFi.
We were able to download the software for HBOMax to our firestick. We have HBOMax, but no app for Firestick exists currently.
The Firestick is pretty sweet for the money. I would strongly recommend never wasting money on a Smart TV again, just my a TV and add a Firestick or Roku like device.
Similarly, I was able to install apps like Netflix and Kodi on a Firestick without any jailbreaking or advanced hacking. So, what are you trying to do? “Jailbreaking” may be necessary if you want to modify or patch or examine the operating system, but not for watching stuff or running normal programs.
I completely agree that a Firestick or Roku is a much better option than a smart tv if getting a dumb tv will save you significant money. I bought a dumb tv nine years ago and used a Blu-ray player for the smarts. Eventually Amazon updated to the point that it didn’t work on the Blu-ray so Amazon gave me a free Firestick. I love it.
Modifying your Firestick will give you the ability to link to pirate sites where you can view not only Netflix’s content for free but also any movie that is currently in the theaters within a day of their release. A few people at my former job do this and explained to me how to do it when I first got mine. The quality of the movies apparently varies a great deal. As I said upthread, I never followed through so I don’t have first hand knowledge.
You can pirate movies on a Firestick all day, every day without any modification whatsoever. That has nothing to do with Jail breaking.
Jailbreaking would be useful if you wanted to, for instance, install Debian Linux on your Fire stick.
Or if keeping your dumb tv will save you $$$. We’ve got an old TV, no cable, but we got a cheap Leaf antenna, and bought a Firestick. Right out of the box, we can get Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime without any trouble.
And the voice command is handy: “Play Ozark” and it switches the TV to the FireStick, launches Netflix, selects “Dad’s” account… asks “Resume playing?”, and plays Ozark right from where I left off.
Sorry for my giddiness, but I’m old and low-tech, and this is like living in the future, ah tells ya!
Discovered something new and nice with the Firesticks. My TVs are a prior generation Vizio Smart TV and we can’t cast to it from phones/pads, well apparently we can connect to Firesticks to do what the TV doesn’t.