Comment by alasano
25 days ago
What's crazy is that it's still close to the best device you can get.
I'd upgrade my Shield Pro to something else but there's nothing to upgrade to that doesn't have some compromise on formats or capabilities.
25 days ago
What's crazy is that it's still close to the best device you can get.
I'd upgrade my Shield Pro to something else but there's nothing to upgrade to that doesn't have some compromise on formats or capabilities.
> What's crazy is that it's still close to the best device you can get.
Unless you prefer an Android TV device, I don't get the appeal of the Shield Pro. I bought one years ago and resold it a few months later. For me the only things it did better than an Apple TV (playing certain ripped blu-rays) are better done by the Ugoos AM6B+. So those are the two devices I use nowadays.
The appeal of the Shield Pro is you don't have to deal with custom flashing a "no-name" device and you don't have to dual box to keep streaming services happy.
It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now. It's really sluggish
I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7. They're clearly on board with DV in general and don't hesitate to play Dolby's branding games, so why not profile 7 support???
> The appeal of the Shield Pro is you don't have to deal with custom flashing a "no-name" device and you don't have to dual box to keep streaming services happy.
Fair, but I just wasn't willing to put up with Android TV. And the Shield doesn't handle FEL so there's still some ripped content it won't play.
For me it's easy enough to use my Apple TV for streaming and even most ripped blu-rays, and the Ugoos for the blu-ray rips that benefit from it. Flashing the AMB6+ was a one-time thing. After that, updating the OS is just dropping a tar file into a folder and rebooting it.
> It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now.
It's a niche market and any all-in-one box is likely to run afoul of Dolby Labs licensing restrictions.
> I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7.
I don't even care about pass through audio if it could just use Dolby MAT to playback decoded DTS:X / Dolby TrueHD Atmos w/o losing the spatial channels.
DV Profile 7 is very likely Dolby licensing issues.
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It wouldn't surprise me if there's pressure from Dolby or the media companies to not do so, since Profile 7 is only used on BluRay (and the primary use case for playing back BluRays on Apple TVs I'm pretty sure is not playing backed-up personally-owned media). And, I'm sure Apple isn't losing many sales to not supporting it.
Lack of pass-through could probably be argued the same way, although it is a bit more surprising.
How was it better than an AppleTV playing ripped Blu-rays? With Infuse on the AppleTV I've been able to play every rip I have (4K HDR movies, dozens of TV episodes).
The Apple TV doesn't support DV profile 7 (you just get the HDR base layer; you lose the enhancement layer), nor does it support TrueHD Atmos (you get the bed channels but lose height channels). Same for DTS:X.
Whether or not this matters or you notice will depend on the specific Blu-ray and whether you have a Dolby Atmos capable sound system.
https://community.firecore.com/t/dolby-vision-profile-7-8-su...
https://community.firecore.com/t/help-get-more-dolby-atmos-o...
https://old.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/1789et4/does_infus...
Same here. I just ordered a new one because there's basically no better alternative that supports so many formats. My TV, for example, doesn't support TrueHD 7.1, but the Nvidia Shield Pro does. I guess the new Apple TV 4K is also worse in this regard.
It depends on what you're looking for exactly. Some models of FireTV Cube have pretty beefy processors and can handle some things the Shield can't, like Dolby Vision FEL.