Rant: New Fire TV Cube (3rd gen) is trash
Tl;dr: Buy an Apple TV.
Sorry if there already are posts like this, but I want to share my experience.
So I got a new Fire TV Cube recently after the old one started stuttering heavily and sometimes completely crashing.
Hopeful, I installed it as soon as it arrived. Maybe it would finally consistently play back at 24p. Maybe it would finally no longer randomly output stereo (for example Youtube content) in dolby digital, so that the AVR is not able to upscale it properly. Maybe they would finally increase the quality of the remote. Maybe they generally increased the quality of the device.
First, the positive: It does finally output stereo sound as stereo and not as stereo-fixed in a dolby signal. And yes it is faster than the old one. But that is where the improvements end.
The negative:
The new remote is even shittier than the old one. It is built to such a low standard that it already creaks more strongly than the old one after years of use. Its got extra "Ad" buttons now for certain streaming services, yay!
The device still cannot handle 24p properly. How is that still a thing in 2026? Bluray Players could do this over a decade ago and the Apple TV apparently can do it for years, how can they still not figure this out? While technically, it does support automatic framerate switching and did that when freshly set up, it promptly stopped doing that as soon as it went to sleep a couple of times. Now I can get it to do that again, if I were to change some stupid setting like color depth each time I wake this thing from sleep, but it will basically only work until the next time that I put it to sleep. Basically: Yes it does support it, but it is so buggy that it is practically unusable.
And then an entirely new issue suddenly pops up. I do not know if it did this from the start, but now it does not even properly output full RGB 0-255 colors anymore even if that mode is selected. It seems to output RGB as a signal, but it converted the space wrong because the black-levels are all messed up (the image and especially black bars are essentially grey instead of black). It feels like it sends out YCbCr Colors in a RGB 0-255 format. I solved this in a kind-of workaround by using the YCBCr-Mode, which seems to work fine, but should obviously not be necessary.
On top of all of this we get an ever increasing amount of ads and a trashier interface as time goes on.
Considering that an Apple TV will even last longer than this stuff, I would recommend anybody buy that instead of this crappy thing. The price difference is minimal considering that you will likely get a much better device there. Since I am sadly just past the return window as I fully realize the scope of the misery, I will stick with it for now. But I want to warn anybody else: Buy an Apple TV.