Firestick 4K - Previews/Trailers play or show subtitles in other language

Hi:

In the last few months, I've increasingly had issues with my Firestick 4K. What used to be a pleasure to use is becoming a pain. For starters, show/movie trailers are now either playing in French, Italian or Spanish. I am only fully fluent in English, and I don't watch content in other languages. The default language is set to English. Sometimes, the audio is in the foreign language but there are subtitles in Italina, Spanish or French.

No software updates are currently available. Multiple resets to factory defaults have proven useless.  The usual overseas call center reps are clueless. Twice, they've promised to help fix the problem and tell me they're "working on a solution", but anyone who's tech savvy knows what that means.

Anyone know anything about this issue?

No, other than a friend has gone through about 6 of them last year for not working properly. Not asked regarding this year.

Wow, thanks for that. I had no idea Amazon wasn't fixing things. I guess they don't make enough profits to hire good coders/QA testers, right?   

I'm going off-topic a bit here, but I also have a problem with the Firestick not showing many or even most of the shows I put on the watchlist. Anyone else seen that problem?

I believe that is why friend went through so many Firestick's.  Think is no using Cromecast but not sure.

Wow.

And...now that Amazon has announced tons of layoffs in their hardware department, I doubt the problems will be fixed any time soon.

Is there no better platform for streaming common content?

Oh, now it gets better. Tonight, I watched 1 1/2 episodes of a very good show. Of course, the Firestick is designed so that if you pause for too long, it takes you back to the home menu. When I went back to find the show, it was nowhere to be found.

So I called Amazon to ask where to find the show. The person on the other end of the phone seemed to be not only stupid, but to have pretty serious memory problems. Or maybe he is on drugs, or is developmentally delayed, I don't know.

He asked me where I found the show. I told him if I knew where to find it, I wouldn't have called him, would I?. At this point he insisted it was in another app. that I didn't have installed. I asked this genius, if the app wasn't installed, how did I watch two episodes of the show tonight ? (I'd already told him this several times). He then proceeded to to ask me again in which app I watched it. I once again gave him the answer above. The third time I told him not to ask me that question again, that he'd already asked me that twice. Guess what he asked? In fact, he asked this question 5 times in total.

I finally just Googled using my PC and found the show. Strangely, however, I could not find it in its app on the Firestick. He proceeded to ask me again...So I just gave up. Again.

What a dumpster fire the Firestick has become. Amazon? Are you listening? Nah, I didn't think so.

I'm open to substitutions...something's gotta be better than this.

Edited by Shplad, 08 January 2023 - 12:24 AM.

I just got off the phone with an Amazon supervisor. He told me that the show had been removed from availability from Amazon customers. Huh? I asked him what warning was given etc and he answered "none". I asked him why a company would do something like that, and he had no answer. In fact, he told me that he had heard of one customer who was watching a show, paused it to go away for a few minutes and when he came back, that series was no longer available. Yes, you read that right. Amazon doesn't even warn you AFTER it's happened.

Wow. Dumpster fire.

Remember when streaming was going to be so wonderful? In some ways, it has been, but in other ways....

It is now 8 months since I made the initial post here.  I just wanted to know that I recently updated to the latest firmware, and yes...no change.

I'm leaning towards getting a used Nvidia Shield Pro. At least Nvidia does bugfixes and the Shields don't have laggy performance.

For what it's worth I haven't had any real issues with a FireStick Lite I've been using for a few months.  It was an impulse buy for £20 in the pre-xmas sales so wasn't expecting much at all, but it's been surprisingly good.  No foreign language stuff happening, and while not exactly super responsive, it doesn't seem to lag as much as some TV's when opening apps etc.  Are you using a VPN set to a different location by any chance?

As for Amazon removing series, yes - it's frustrating if they do it while you're in the middle of watching one.  Their "Prime" streaming service at least in the UK I've found not that brilliant - and it's frustrating that often anything I do want to watch is chargeable!  It does have some good stuff from time to time, but then a lot of rubbish too, and they do turn the content over quite frequently...  If someone wanted a cheap way to convert a non-smart TV to something that can watch the catch up services, Prime, Netflix etc. I'd probably still recommend one.  Certainly over some malware infested no-name Android box or something.

Thanks for that. Android streaming boxes have malware? I wasn't even aware there was much malware yet for Linux. I know there's some.

Interesting that you don't hear the trailers in foreign languages as I do.

I think I'm still going to try to get an Nvidia Shield. I'm tired of all the Amazon nonsense. Of course, this will probably be one of those" when I find time" projects.

Here's one example of sophisticated malware being found pre-installed on an Android TV box - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/android-tv-box-on-amazon-came-pre-installed-with-malware/
 
As far as I know, it's not applicable to devices from reputable companies - it's the no name boxes for sale via marketplaces that are problematic.  A more in depth dive into the problem is covered in this video:

I don't know if what you're seeing might be location related?  One thing perhaps, is that I'm using PiHole to block ads, trackers and malicious sites at the router level.  It doesn't stop ads entirely on SmartTV's but limits them.

Edited by jonuk76, 21 April 2023 - 12:20 AM.