What You Can Do With the Fire TV System X-Ray

All Amazon Fire TV and Fire Stick, version 5.0.2 and above, have a tool known as System X-Ray. This is for external and internal developers to identify system or app problems. It gathers and displays system metrics as an overlay on top of the screen. Once turned on, this overlay will remain visible irrespective of what you are doing on your Fire TV. Here’s how to enable System X-Ray, and a list of what you can do with it.

1. Press the center and down button
Press the ‘Center’ and ‘Down’ buttons together for 5 seconds. Then release.

2. Press MENU button
Once you release the ‘Center’ and ‘Down’ buttons, press the ‘Menu’ button.

3. Navigate the developer tools menu
You will find three or six options (depending on the version of your Fire TV). They are ‘System X-Ray’, ‘Record and Share’, ‘Safezone’, the ‘Developer Options’ and ‘Launch Network Advisor’. Each of these tools has a different effect on your Fire TV.

The different displays when you turn on System X-Ray
1. Display (DIS)
The display section will tell you the picture resolution. You will see whether your device is running on 4K UHD or HD.

2. CPU
This section shows the percentage of CPU usage of the different cores of the device. Each individual bar represents a different core. ‘Green’ (0% to 33%) means low utilization, ‘Orange’ (34% to 66%) means moderate utilization, while ‘Red’ (67% to 100%) means high utilization. This can help you to identify apps that are CPU-intensive. If your Amazon Fire TV has only 2 cores you will see only two bars.

3. Memory
Scanning through the memory used by the foreground app, other apps, and the available memory can help you to identify when an app is using too much memory. It also shows you low memory on your device, as well as memory leaks.

4. Network
This section will show you the Wi-Fi strength and download rates. The bar labeled ‘RSSI’ tells you the strength of your Wi-Fi signal. The bar has color codes: green is strong, orange is average and red is weak. This bar will not show if you are using a wired connection.
‘System’ shows the size of bits downloaded per second. It is always higher than ‘Visible’ which shows the download by foreground app. This section can help you to diagnose connectivity issues, slow download speed, as well as lower stream quality.