How to manually upgrade/downgrade your Amazon FireTV

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Update 02/03/2015

This guide I posted is well out of date, there are other methods to follow now days.
Please use http://www.aftvnews.com/tag/guide/ as it is up to date and current.

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Thanks to AFTVNews.com for the OTA link and rbox for pointing me in the right direction I've successfully manually upgraded to the latest firmware, downgraded back to 51.1.0.2 and am now upgrading back to 51.1.1.0.

This is the process I followed. I take it for granted that you rooted, have SU and Busybox free installed.

Don't blame me if you **** your device up and you have a brick.

So lets get to it:

1. Download which ever firmware you wish to restore to:

2. Rename which ever one you wish to restore to update.zip

3. adb shell

4. su

5. chmod 777 cache

6. cd cache

7. chmod 777 recovery

8. cd recovery

9. echo --update_package=/cache/update.zip > command

10. ctrl + c

11. adb push update.zip /cache

--- Go make coffee or take a ****....The pushing of 466MB takes forever over wireless.---

An alternative is to copy update.zip to a USB Flash Drive, use StickMount to mount on the FireTV then copy it with the following command:

cp /sdcard/usbStorage/sda1/update.zip /cache

12. adb reboot recovery

Now it should reboot and start installing whatever update you downloaded and called update.zip :good:

If you get the out of space error:

roligov said:

No it's not because the updates are blocked, it's because you out of space in your cache partition. ADB shell to the box and run
ll /cache
If you have any bin files, delete them.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

1. adb shell

2. su

3. rm /cache/*.bin

For those who are manually updating.

I did the manual update and was really pleased with the new firmware. I started having problems with WiFi dropping and I figured it was my router but decided to check with Amazon customer service to see if people had reported it. They asked me to verify my firmware version and when I did they told me I should not have received the update yet. I put on my "I don't know how this newfangled technologicky stuff works" voice and asked a bunch of stupid questions like could hooking up to a friends network or having the date set wrong have made it update. He bought it and said it appears to have happened to a few people.

He did give me the obligatory "it would void your warranty" if I installed it manually speech then verified my connection looked good and they could see my unit over the web. He asked if I waned to replace it under warranty anyway to be safe, I declined and he let me know I would hvae to go through all the steps we had again if I wanted to replace it later.

So short story long - I would keep you old version number handy if you manually update and maybe end up getting a soft brick you can't recover yourself down the road, at least until we are pretty sure the official update has gone global.

Got it working with Windows 7

This is how I done it.
(Ensure you have ADB installed - If not google "ADB setup 1.3 windows")
Download the chosen firmware and rename it to update.zip
Download roligov's command file
remove the .txt extension that windows gives it when you download it. The filename should just be "command" with no extension otherwise you will get the failed message when you reboot to recovery.

Now run command prompt as Administrator
(I will use C:\ as the file location example)

adb kill-server
adb start-server
adb connect "Fire TV IP Address"
adb shell
su
chmod 777 cache
cd cache
chmod 777 recovery
ctrl + c
adb push C:\command /cache/recovery
adb push C:\update.zip /cache

--- Go make coffee or take a ****....The pushing of 466MB takes forever.--- (Took 2 minutes over LAN for me)

adb reboot recovery

Done
Many thanks to roligov for the initial find to set me on my way.

It automatically gets deleted. It's late this side so I'm going to bed.

Will do some testing tomorrow before I give the go ahead and tell everyone it's all working!

Ok, I am assuming that when you reboot your FTV after completing the downgrade steps, the FTV shows an error message and boots back into the current firmware.

Assuming that....

Go to http://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-manually-upgrade-or-downgrade-the-amazon-fire-tv/

I am sure you are following the guide step by step. What you will do is, scroll down the guide and go to the section titled "If downgrading fails:". Follow that line by line and run that on your FTV (important to run all the rm commands to get rid of the stuff you pushed to FTV). Once done, reboot your FTV normally.

Next, start working through the steps one by one from the very top (you do not need to re-download files if you already have them on your computer, but you will re-push them back to FTV as the previous steps in the "If downgrading fails" will get rid of those files from FTV) AND STOP AFTER STEP 8. FOR STEP 9, DO NOT RUN THE COMMAND LISTED THERE. Instead, you will run:

echo “--update_package=/cache/update.zip” > command

Note, there is a double quotation mark before -- and after zip.

Follow the guide from Step 10 onwards.

IF YOU SUCCESSFULLY DOWNGRADE, IT WILL REMOVE ROOT. RUN TOWELROOT AND RE-ROOT IT. ONCE RE-ROOTED, RUN THE DISABLE COMMAND ON FTV TO STOP OTA UPGRADES (Not sure if you need to run that command, but run it anyways...)

Let us know how it goes....