How FTVDB Began

In 2019 I visited New York for the first time in my life.

I was amazed by Amazon’s delivery speed. It felt like I could buy almost anything and it would be at my door the next day. During that trip I bought a Fire TV Stick 4K, and that device ended up changing much more than my TV setup.

At the time my main streaming device was a Roku HDMI stick. I also used an EzCast 4K for display mirroring. The Fire TV Stick 4K felt like a breakthrough compared to both. I do not really like Android as a platform, but the fact that I could run so many different apps on a TV was genuinely exciting. I was able to run an AirPlay server and stream my display in a way that worked surprisingly well, so the Fire TV Stick 4K replaced both my Roku HDMI stick and my EzCast 4K.

The device that pulled me in

Later I found the Kamakiri exploit, which made it possible for me to root the device. That opened the door to SSH access and a lot of late-night experimenting with the internals. It was fun, but it also came with a cost: OTA updates became unreliable, and full updates often failed because I had TWRP on the device.

That pushed me into the logs. I figured out I could use logcat and other system logs to see firmware and app update URLs. Once I realized those URLs were visible, I started asking a simple question: if the device can see them, can I find them elsewhere and use them to update manually through TWRP?

The answer was partly yes, but finding the latest working URLs was not easy at all. That gap was the real beginning of this project.

April 2020: the real start

In April 2020 I started saving every new update URL I could find. At first it all lived in a Pastebin. That was the moment the FTVDB story really began.

I kept adding new URLs and formatting them into a table that was actually readable. Over time people started mentioning it on XDA forums, which told me the idea was useful beyond my own devices.

From Pastebin to GitHub

Eventually I got tired of editing the table by hand every time a new URL appeared, so I moved the project to a GitHub Gist. That change mattered because it let me build a command line tool that could generate the table automatically instead of forcing me to update it manually line by line.

It stayed like that for quite a while. Later other XDA enthusiasts started building similar tables too, which was a good sign that the need was real.

2025: turning it into a community project

By early 2025 I was no longer using Fire TV as heavily as before. I was busy, I was not collecting logs as quickly, and it became obvious that the project could not keep growing if it depended only on me catching everything in time.

That was the point where I decided FTVDB needed help from the community.

I was genuinely happy to discover that ftvdb.com was available. That was exactly the name I had imagined the project should live under.

I am a C++ developer. I know how to build services and apps, but I do not know much about making a polished website. So I worked with Codex, and together we turned the idea into a website that was, in my opinion, beautiful enough and fully functional.

On the backend side I built several C++ services to handle the API server, validate submitted URLs, generate the GitHub database, and update the website automatically. That was the moment the system became truly alive.

What FTVDB is now

Today users can submit URLs and the services process them automatically, create new items in the GitHub database, and update the website. The server does not host firmware or app files. It only works with public data sent by users and indexed by the project.

That part matters to me. FTVDB exists to make this information easier to find, preserve, and organize, not to mirror files.

I am happy with what this project became. I can see that it helps people fix devices, install updates, research firmware history, and browse app and firmware records that would otherwise be hard to track down.

What started with one Fire TV Stick 4K in New York became a community resource, and that is still the best part of the whole story.