I’m having an odd issue when watching BBC iPlayer here in France. I’m using a VPN app in my Amazon Fire TV stick. iPlayer almost always works fine when watching on demand programmes. The problem I’m having at the moment is that live stream channels pretty much never work unless you wait a few minutes. I select a channel, try to watch, then Error 2000 appears. I then leave it for a few minutes and 9 times out of 10, it works and it’s fine after that. Is this what others using the same setup experience?
for completeness, can you say which VPN as not all VPNs are equal…
You’re right, but I’d rather - to start with - try to eliminate the possibility that it’s a Fire TV stick issue independent of the VPN used.
Do you have another device you can try? For what it’s worth, my money is on the VPN.
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It’s definitely an issue with the Fire TV stick - using the same VPN on my phone or PC works fine.
Used to use Fire Sticks but kept on having performance issues with them when using different apps. It was fine for the Amazon Prime app and Plex (which connected to my locally stored NAS), but using a VPN and iPlayer or 4OD became unusable.
Bit the bullet and invested in an Android TV box a couple of years ago and haven’t regretted it since. The one I use is a Formula Z8 Pro, which has been replaced by much more recent versions now (they’re up to Z11 now, I think). It’s more expensive than a Fire Stick but I highly recommend it for a hassle-free viewing experience.
The Fire TV Stick works fine except for the iPlayer live stream channel issue I described. It’s just weird that I can binge on a whole mini-series via on-demand and then switch to live BBC1 and Error 2000 appears for 5 minutes. It may well be the VPN I’m using, but I don’t think I’ve had a response here from anyone using iPlayer on a Fire TV stick here in France… yet. It would be really good to know if others here don’t have the same problem.
I’ve got a collection of devices, which fire stick do you have and I’ll see if I have the same. Off the top of my head, I have a Cube, a Max and a Lite.
Thanks for offering👍 We use two, one 4K+ and a standard HD version for the smaller TV in the kitchen. Both exhibit the same problem.
Just tried the 4k and it worked perfectly for on demand and on live streams.
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On BBC iPlayer? OK - which VPN do you use?
That was using my own OpenVPN server in my parents’ attic but it works equally well with NordVPN.
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An interesting thread and will be interested to see if any conclusions, as I had two firesticks which I’ve also ditched now as totally unusable to watch anything except Prime. I would just keep getting the screen freeze and timer thing pop up continually.
It’s always worth checking how much free memory you have as they are quite constrained on memory and it can cause odd behaviours.
I started out with firesticks which had quite a few problems especially with memryy, then android TV boxes and ended up with Lenovo Thinkcentre tiny PC’s with i5, 8gb memory, 250gb sdd and windows 11 or Ubuntu, on the back of all the telly’s and it means visitors don’t need to bring laptops with them from the UK.
I got fed up with the unreliability of the firesticks and use Sky Go which was touch and go with both firesticks and android boxes.
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Nice setup having your own VPN server👍
Just one last check - are the VPN clients you use for the Fire TV Sticks installed in the Firesticks or somewhere else (e.g. your router?)
I pretty much only use France 24 and BBC iPlayer on the Fire TV Sticks - everything else we watch is via the TV’s own operating system.
On the fire sticks.
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Many thanks - I’m using Surf Shark for my VPNs - it’s very affordable and tends not to sacrifice too much bandwidth. ExpressVPN has a decent offer on at the moment so I may try them.
Express and Pure are the only two I have never had any problems with the firesticks, Nord never worked reliably with Sky Go and iPlayer.