Kodi and FireStarter on Amazon Fire TV

Before we begin …

This article will be a lot shorter than the original article!
The original article however has a ton of useful information in it, so it’s definitely worth reading.

To get Kodi on your Amazon Fire TV or Amazon Fire TV Stick, we will need the following:

• Amazon Fire TV or Amazon Fire TV Stick
• Android ARM version of KODI
• A copy of the free tool ADBFire
• A computer connected to the same network as the Amazon Fire TV [Stick]
• A functional network (wired or Wifi)

Step 1 – Download Kodi

It appears that the download page of Kodi is a little confusing for some readers (absolutely no disrespect intended!), so I’ll walk through this step by step.

Go to the download page on the KODI website by following this link. It could look something like this (this is a screenshot of an older KODI version):

Amazon Fire TV – Download the right Kodi version

We will need to download the ANDROID version (the green puppet) and click the “ARM” link (as indicated above).

This will result in downloading a file with the extension “APK“.
So if you got “EXE” or “ZIP” then you picked the wrong file!

Step 2 – Download ADBFire

Jocala has kindly requested me to no longer host a copy of ADBFire, so you’ll have to go to his website by following this link.

On that page, scroll down to roughly the middle of the page where you will find something like this (note: version numbers can be different):

Download adbFire 2.01 for Windows

Download adbFire 2.01 for OS X 10.7 or greater

Download adbFire 2.01 for Linux

Click the version applicable for your Operating System.

Note : The screenshots shown in this article will be based on v2.01 for Mac OS X. The screens for Windows and Linux will look very similar.

Step 3 – Setup you Amazon Fire TV

Next we will have to setup our Amazon Fire TV. Just follow the instructions that came with the Amazon Fire TV.

If you run into issues, go through the original article where several issues and hints can be found.

To setup a Amazon Fire TV, you will need to setup an Amazon account, but only a username, password and billing address are needed. You do not need to enter credit card info or anything like that.

Make sure the Amazon Fire TV is working, and has a network (wired is recommended, but WiFi fill work as well) connection that works. This should be the same network of course as used with the computer/laptop we are going to use for this article.

p.s. I love Amazon Prime, so I can really recommend it. It;s totally optional! But if you’d like you can sign up for the free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime. Even if you’d do it just for the 30 trial days, you’d enjoy free 2-day shipping, and thousands of songs, movies and TV Show and yes, you’d support us with that as well … 

Step 4 – Prepare your Amazon Fire TV for Kodi

Before we can upload Kodi to our Amazon Fire TV, we will need to do a few minor settings.

 Enabling Developer and Unknown Sources Options

On the home screen of your Amazon Fire TV, scroll down to “Settings“.

Scroll to the right to the “System” option and select this, where you’ll select “Developer Options” and enable “ADB Debugging” (set it to “ON”).

 If available, enable “Apps from Unknown Sources” as well.

When done, press the return button on your remote, so you’re back in the “System” menu.

Amazon Fire TV – Goto Developer options

Amazon Fire TV – Enable ADB and Apps from others

 Find the IP address of your Amazon Fire TV

Still in the “System” menu, scroll up to the “About” option. There you scroll down to the “Network” option.

Here we will find the IP address of our Amazon Fire TV, in the example below 192.168.2.88 (yours will very likely be different).
Write this IP address down, we will need the IP address in a next step.

Amazon Fire TV – Finding the IP Address

Step 5 – Sending KODI to your Amazon Fire TV

I assume you have your computer (desktop or laptop) up and running, and that you have installed (!) ADBFire.

OK, now that we have ADBFire installed, start it up. The v2.x ADBFire will look something like displayed below.
For those who’ve followed the original article, you will notice that Jocala has done quite a bit of impressive work with ADBFire.

ADBFire – Version 2.x

Now we need to tell ADBFire where to find our Amazon Fire TV – we will need the IP Address from our Amazon Fire TV for that, which you did write down in the step before.

In ADBFire, click “New“, a window will popup where we ONLY fill in the following:

1. Give it a name you will recognize in the future, for example “AFTV Living room”. We enter this in the “Description” field.
2. Enter the Amazon Fire TV IP address into the field “Address“.

Do NOT change any of the other settings unless you really know what you’re doing.

When completed, the window could look something like this, and you can now click “Save“.

ADBFire – Device setup

After you have clicked “Save”, you might have to wait a few seconds, but eventually the dropdown under “Current Device” should show you the device we’ve just “created”.

ADBFire – The new device we just added

To connect to your Amazon Fire TV, click the “Connect” button.

In the lists “Connected Devices” you will see the IP address of your device, and in the list “Status” it should [eventually] say “device”. Once that’s the case, we’re good to go for the next step.

To install KODI, click “Install APK“. A dialog will open, where we will select the KODI APK file that we downloaded in step 1.
Click “OK” or “Open“, and in the next dialog window (“install …”) click “Yes“.

The upload will take a while, you can see the progress bar at the bottom:

ADBFire – Uploading KODI

Once completed, a message will confirm that KODI has been uploaded, click “OK“:

ADBFire – KODI installed

Step 6 – Install and Start FireStarter

FireStarter is a great little tool for the Amazon Fire TV. You can find it at GitHub as well, but with ADBFire we don’t need to worry about that.

The coolest thing of FireStarter is that it “catches” pressing the “Home” button on your Amazon Fire TV remote. In essence the usual action (showing the Amazon Home Screen) will be completed, but in an instant of a second, the FireStarter will show it’s own “home” screen, which will show a link to Kodi, the Amazon Home Screen and the Amazon Fire TV settings.

Anyhow, let’s install FireStarter.

With ADBFire still connected to your Amazon Fire TV, click the “FireStarter” button. A dialog will popup where we click “Install“. After a few seconds (it’s pretty fast). Once completed, a dialog will popup informing you about that.

NOTE: Newer adbFire versions (2.03+) no longer have a “FireStarter” button, and FireStarter can now be found in the menu “File”  “Install FireStarter”. Since FireStarter has been blacklisted by Amazon, it might not even work or the function to install it might be removed from future versions of adbFire all together.

Next: get FireStarter started.

To get FireStarter started, the first time, we need to go to the Amazon “Home Screen” (press the “home” button on the Amazon Fire TV remote).

Scroll down to “Settings“, scroll to the right to “Applications“, press the “Select” button on the remote, and scroll down to the “Manage Installed Applications” and select it. A list of installed Apps should appear now.

Now scroll down to “FireStarter” and select it. A new “list” appears where we select “Launch Application“. Right after launching FireStarter, you will see a screen like below …. and this is the screen that will appear each time you press the “home” button on the Amazon Fire TV remote:

FireStarter – Home Screen

You’re done now … start KODI and it will run the “first time” setup.

Next Steps …

As a next step, if you haven’t done so already, I’d recommend reading the Tips and Tricks section of the original article.

Enjoy your new Kodi HTPC!