Photo viewing is probably where this media player shines the most. The same goes for files above 30 fps, since I often encountered the same error message when trying to play 60 fps files. It would often display an “Unable to play” message for HEVC files, which would then go away when I backed out and immediately tried playing the file again. I was able to play AVC H.264, HEVC H.265, and AV1 video files in resolutions up to 4K, but the player seemed to have the least issues with H.264 files. The video player supports all the formats you’d expect, including MKV, MP4, MOV, and WEBM files. It’s just a grid of media that you can scroll through and select. There are very few frills with using the app.

Under those tabs is a list of the various directories on your external drive, if you prefer to navigate through the file system instead. Along the top are tabs for seeing just the videos, images, and audio files separately. There is no way to use Amazon’s media player to play local files stored on the Fire TV Cube’s internal storage, as far as I can tell, so this is strictly for accessing media on external USB drives. Once in the Media Player, you’ll see a grid of all of the media files on your external drive.

If you miss the prompt or want to access your external media later, you can always open the media player from the input menu, which is between the profile icon and the search icon on the Fire TV’s main navigation menu. Like all past Fire TV models, the new Cube only supports FAT32 formatted USB drives, so it can’t access a drive formatted with exFAT, NTFS, HFS, or APFS. When you plug a USB drive that contains media files into the Fire TV Cube’s full-sized USB-A port, you’ll see a prompt in the lower right corner to press the menu button to launch into the device’s built-in media player. While it’s certainly not going to replace full-fledged media players like Plex, MrMC, or even VLC, it’s definitely handy to have for quick and simple access to your media files. This is the same app found on nearly all Fire TV Smart TVs, but this is the first Amazon has included it on one of its stand-alone Fire TVs.

The 3rd-gen Fire TV Cube is far from the first Fire TV model to officially supports external USB media, but it is the first to include a built-in media player app from Amazon that can display videos, photos, and play audio files.

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