Questions about the Mezzmo app on Fire TV

We use Mezzmo (currently 5.0.5.0) running on a Windows 7 machine as a home media server. We just acquired a Fire TV with the standard voice remote, which is installed in my housemate’s room, and put the Mezzmo app on it.

I’m a bit uncertain about a few things... and she has minimal patience for things that don’t “just work” as I tell her they will.

1. Under exactly what conditions will Mezzmo stop when it is done playing a video, as opposed to proceeding automatically to the next video in the playlist? She almost never wants it to play the next video automatically; so I want to be able to tell her, clearly, start the video this way (use the center-of-the-circle select button, use the play/pause button, whatever) and it will stop when the video is done and wait for you to tell it what to do next.

2. Is there an explanation somewhere of what the remote buttons do on each screen? The wiki information appears to be written with touch screen users in mind.

3. The wiki says the Mezzmo app’s built-in video player includes Excellent file format support; but it doesn’t say what that file support actually is. I prefer not to enable server transcoding—I transcode files on my computer, if necessary, before copying them to our server, so I can control the parameters. I’d like to know exactly what are the target requirements for video playing through the Mezzmo app on a second generation Amazon Fire TV (box, not stick).

4. Is it possible to use the voice feature of the remote to search within the Mezzmo library?

5. She almost always has her Windows 8.1 laptop readily available, connected wirelessly to the same network to which the Fire TV and the computer running the Mezzmo server are wired. If she looks through the web interface to the Mezzmo server and finds something she wants to play there, can she use the web interface to direct the Fire TV to play it (rather than having it play on the laptop... similar to the way I gather Mezzmo on a cell phone can choose a media item but direct a different device to render it)?

Hi Coises,
1. When you select to play a video in the Mezzmo Android app all the media files from the current playlist are added to the queue in the app's playlist so each video will be played in turn until the end of the playlist. If you want to just play one video you can long click on the video and then select 'Queue File' and this will just add the selected file to the app's playlist. This will not replace the existing content in the app's playlist so if you queue a file it will get added to the end of the app's playlist and you will need to clear it if you want the file to start playing when you add it. So the procedure would be to go to the playlist page and clear the playlist by clicking on the 'X' then go to the file you want to play and long press the remote's center button to show the menu then select 'Queue File' to play it.

2. The button on the remote should allow moving the selection cursor around the screen and the center button selects the item. The button with the three horizontal lines opens the Mezzmo app's menu and the back button will go back a page in the app. The Home button leaves the app and goes back to the FireTV menu. The Rewind, play/pause and fast forward buttons operate when media is playing and allow seeking for video and play/pause for video and audio.

3. The supported formats can be found in the Conceiva Mezzmo (Android) device profile, it should be able to play most of the common formats (mkv, avi, mp4, wmv, ts, etc) with codecs mpeg2video, h264, mpeg4, wmv2, aac, ac3, dts, mp2, mp3. If you are encoding your files before copying them to your server then you should use mp4 with h264 and aac audio for best results.

4. The voice feature currently only supports searching within the FireTV and cannot be used to search directly within the Mezzmo library. You can use the search button on the media page of the Mezzmo app to search the Mezzmo library and then press the microphone button on the dialog to input the search term using the microphone.

5. It is not currently possible to play a file from the web interface to the FireTV, we may add support for this in the future. Since the Laptop uses Windows you could install Mezzmo to the laptop then use Play To from the Mezzmo application on the laptop to play files to the FireTV running the Mezzmo Android app, you can add files from the Network Media tab in the Mezzmo application if your media files are served from another Mezzmo server.

#1

Are there really so few people who want to play one movie, concert or whatever at a time that it wasn’t worth providing a simple, straightforward way to do that?

Please, please... give us something!

For Fire TV (and generic Android TV, or anything else that uses a remote), perhaps you could make the Play button on the remote do what I’m asking: just immediately play the selected item and then stop. That would be simple and straightforward from a user’s perspective.


#3

A couple nights ago, I was pleased to see that the Mezzmo app on the 2nd generation Fire TV can play HEVC/h.265. (I hoped it would, since I see that Fire TV Gen. 2 supports hardware accelerated decoding of H.265.) However, I just looked at the file ConceivaMezzmoAndroid.prf: it doesn’t contain the strings “265” or “HEVC” anywhere. So I have to think it does not contain a full description of what is supported, unless it’s changed since 5.0.5.0.


#4

I think I tried what you suggest, but I couldn’t get it to take voice input without flipping back to the system-wide voice search. (Is the app calling a Google service that’s not supported on Amazon Fire to try to enable the microphone?) In fact, as I recall, I couldn’t even get a keyboard to show on the search dialog, so there was no way to enter anything at all. When I have the opportunity, I’ll try to experiment with this again and let you know what I find; but in the meantime, if you have a Fire TV for testing, you might want to attempt to search and see what happens.

We will look at adding a setting to allow playing just one video.

The Mezzmo app can play h265 but we have not updated the device profile yet, we will update the profile for the next update.

When pressing the microphone on the search dialog it launches an intent for the system to prompt the user for audio input, we don't have a remote with a microphone so here it does nothing but a remote with a microphone should prompt (the Nexus Player here does this). If you move the cursor to the text field then press the select button on the remote the keyboard will appear.

We have implemented a setting to turn on or off the feature that plays multiple videos, by default it is off. We will release this update in the coming days.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Peter

We have implemented a setting to turn on or off the feature that plays multiple videos, by default it is off. We will release this update in the coming days.

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Thank you!