Yes ARC is the "replacement" (despite i prefer optical) of all digital sound plug, and all Home Cinema connectivity. The conductor is an HDMI cable, but carrefull, just like ethernet over HDMI, not all HDMI cable are ARC capable. Generaly you connect everything on your HC pré-Amp (or Amp if less expensive system) and connect your amp with a single HDMI to your display system. ARC also started to come to Hi Fi, (i have an HDMI at the back of my CD player, but only for sound, no display) You mensioned the problem of bandwith: yes there is with some DTS, even more in 4K, but for 90% of the user they don't see the difference. Also don't forget it streaming, and generaly already compresed by provider 🙁 If you need top quality in every point, this product is not for you, but you will need lot more money to have better. For the targeted consumer: Apple TV4K and NVidia Shield are both very good. Talking about Apple TV, you talk about the app i think, but this app is not a great lost as it is great only on Apple TV (the hardware), LG system, and Apple product. It's not hardware and it's not OS limitations 😉 The wiring quality does a lot of difference from one product to other. exemple on 4 modulations cable (RCA/RCA) but it's the same for any wiring: standard one 3 euro 2M Audioquest Golden Gate 79 euro 1.5M Cardas crosslink 199 euro 1M Transparent Musiklink Reference 3089 euro 1M You might think it's just a RCA to RCA so why get something that cost more than the standar one, and it's just totaly wrong at each step your system sound better, but not a little bit, in a big way.

I upgraded from the 2017 model to the new Pro version. Differences for me were the AI feature, the much better remote that uses AA batteries instead of the button type and the fact i can now get Dolby digital sound thru my soundbar from Netflix etc Someone commented that the pro version has a ssd/hdd, this is not correct. That was the 2015 pro model that had that but not anymore.

rl66:

An Athlon 220GE do it very fine with a small GPU (and before it was a Pentium G3248 doing it)... it's not a problem of CPU lol

Yo ri66 as I understand AMD do not have the licence to be able to play 4K blu ray content. What player was you using to get around this. 🙂

sdamaged99:

The website doesn't have a mobile version, its the standard website which on Chrome is identical when choosing either desktop or mobile version. You have to zoom in and out or turn the phone to the side and view in landscape. Works on most other websites, unless i'm doing something wrong specific to Guru3d? I can't be the only person who has noticed this?

You were talking about forums not the main website. That's however in the works, it, however, requires a deep reprogramming of the entire website and is not something easily done. It might be this year or the next before all that is finished.

vestibule:

Yo ri66 as I understand AMD do not have the licence to be able to play 4K blu ray content. What player was you using to get around this. 🙂

it depend, WinDVD pro, and PowerDVD pro decode it fine for everyday use, apple TV for apple movies and a moded VLC for any the other case and when on linux. but many other player can read 4k BR (also it depend of you BR drive lot of issues with my old LG, that should be compatible)

Regarding price: I bought the 2015 model in late 2015 as a replacement for my Open Hour Chameleon Android media center, which failed after 1 year (just outside warranty as well), so I've had about four and a half years of use out of my purchase. And it is still going strong with excellent support. The Chameleon BTW cost me 160 Euros and the support on that thing sucked (the promised Android upgrades never materialized for instance even though they were promised). Before that I had a Boxee Box which cost me 219 Euros and which lasted me for about four years (and that was with a big community support effort after Boxee went under). Most of the cheap Android boxes are already obsolete by the time you get them and aren't worth the money you put in their purchase. The Shield TV is the best purchase for this kind of device that I ever made. Maybe if Boxee hadn't gone down due to their misguided business model it would have rivaled the Shield TV, but that's justr speculation on my part.

superpoeper:

hi owner of the original first gen shield pro 500gb model and the new 2019 pro model (not the tube model reviewed here) the only thing i really dislike with ALL the shield devices is the "walled playstore" experience... i mean it does not support all the apps i'm used to using on my other devices (phone and tablet). they should add a full "normal" playstore with the disclaimer that a lot of apps won't work 100% as intended... simply to give users the freedom to try all the apps they want... instead i am forced to use dubious workaround methods to sideload the apps i really want to use. one example was the DamonPS2 Pro app (a ps2 emulator, just to see how well it functions on a shield pro) to me that is the only real downside to ALL the nvidia shield devices...

This is something that Google foisted on us by the creation of the Android TV subcategory of devices. Instead of forcing developers to create universal apps that work well on normal Android devices and Android TV devices, they basically split the developer pool in two by introducing these specific categories. And for Android TV there is support necessary for controllers and such because they don't have a touch interface. But this could have easily been incorporated in the normal development framework. Instead Google decided that because the way you interact with a large TV device is different from how you interact with a phone/tablet, the entire design of apps for such use should be different. And so developers have to write extra code for Android TV apps. Now as a developer you can create a unified app that would work on all device categories (maybe excluding Android Wear), you just need to add the Android TV specific screen designs and UI handling code to your app. But most developers aren't interested in adding support for Android TV (they deem the install base to small to justify the effort). So we are left with the apps that are specifically created for the Android TV platform or contain support inside for Android TV. You can't really blame NVIDIA for this, because when they decided to create the Shield TV they probably were talked into it by all the Google PR people promising that they would launch and support Android TV in a big way. And especially in the early days that really didn't come to pass.

rl66:

On other hand, if you link a NAS, it is the same thing and more convenient solution, as usable from phone, computer, game system etc etc If you really need more storage there is the Pro version that have kept the extra storage and have more memory too... and is a bit more expensive.

Especially with Android devices size of internal storage matters.