How to Use The Amazon Fire Stick On A Laptop?

Amazon Firestick is a small device which looks like a flash drive, which you can connect to your TV's HDMI port and enjoy streaming services. As this Fire Stick works with any TV with an HDMI port, people sometimes ask is it possible to stream videos by connecting Fire Stick to the laptop.

We generallly carry our laptops along whenever we travel and it seems more convenient to carry a Fire Stick with us and stream videos of our choice whenever we want. All one has to do is to connect is to connect Fire TV Stick to the laptop and watch his or her favorite TV shows. However this is practically impossible. Here, we are available with the reason why one can't connect Fire TV Stick to the laptop.

Why can't One Use Fire Stick on the Laptop?

We connect Fire Stick to the HDMI port of the TV and then watch contents on the screen. The recent laptop models have HDMI, which one can connnect to the monitors. But if you think that connecting your Fire Stick to the laptop will work, then you are wrong. Fire Stick has HDMI output which makes it a broadcast device.

Your laptop's HDMI port is another broadcast output, which sends signals to the screen. Both the devices have broadcast ports and are designed to send signals and not receive them.

Use The Amazon Fire Stick On A Laptop

Even if somehow you turn your Laptop's HDMI port into an input port, then also the things are not going to work. This is because the HDMI port of your laptop is connected to the graphics card and not to the monitor. Therefore, there is no route for signal trransmission. As a result, it is not possible for you to connect Fire Stick to an ordinary laptop.

However, there are two ways that you can try out. We don't recommend any of these strongly but if you want you can try these out.

Way 1: Elgato HD60S and ViewHD HDMI Splitter

This is the box that one can use to remove HDMI output from a game consle and stream it on a laptop or computer system. It has a software that you can use for putting an input from USB wire to a laptop screen.

Nevertheless, you need an extraordinary system to be able to stream and handle such kind of videos. For this, you may require a Windows 10 64 bit PC or Macbook running Sierra. Moreover, you will be needing a really good graphics card and i5 quad core processor.

The signals sent by Fire TV Stick makes use of HDCP server. HDCP is a protocol that encrypts the data from unlawful imitation. The biggest issue is that Elgato HD 60S does not work with HDCP.

Nevertheless, there is a way out using which you can stripe out HDCP encryption by creating a path for the signal through HDMI splitter. This is a devce which is used for splitting HDMI signals but here we just want it to break the HDCP and allow the HDMI signal to pass through.

Once the output of your Fire TV Stick passes through the splitter, the signal goes through the Elgato. Firstly, the signal passes through the Elgato and then through the streaming software and in the end it is broadcasted on the screen of your laptop.

Way 2: Using a Laptop with an HDMI in Port

In the past, there have been laptop products that had both HDMI in port as well as HDMI-out port for viewing content on external monitors and television screen. Before you look forward to buy such a laptop, let us bring to your notice that such kind of laptops were released in the year 2012, which was 8 years ago.

So, you will not be able to use it as it is such an old model. This model was released a few months before the release of Windows 8.