While I surprised that Apple did NOT come out with the capability, I was not surprised at its very sharp picture and continued leverage of a content oriented UI (vs. Apple’s “app centric” approach — even with universal search).
Onkyo is a bit more straight forward in their documentation, but again only have a single port in (under HDMI port 3 for some reason) and an HDCP 2.2 compliant “out” HDMI port. However, they are good enough to clearly document that even on the back of the receiver itself (and in all of their documentation on their own site and at Crutchfields).
So, making all of this work (after a bit of reading) requires:
- Amazon FireTV (or other 4K device supporting Netflix UHD and Amazon UHD).
- An Onkyo TX-NR636 receiver (or better — the NR636 is roughly $499 now). I did update the firmeware for this, which gave me Dolby ATMOS and supposedly improved the HDCP 2.2 handshake. The FireTV needs to be connected to HMDI 3 (STB/DVR).
- The Samsung UH9000 series TV (the 8000 will do 4K only at 30 Hz). The Samsung TV needs to have one end of the HDMI cable in HDMI port 4 (MHP) and the other in the Onkyo out (no other choice really).
From start to finish I probably had 30 minutes invested in the reading, 30 minutes invested in pulling cables in and out of ports, 30 minutes in updating the Onkyo firmware (via USB), and 30 minutes re-programming my Harmony Ultimate Home remote system (previously everything had been through HDMI port 1 on the TV, not 4, because I had no idea what the MHP reference from Samsung was on that port until I read the Crutchfield guide).
The downside for the industry here is rather obvious. This just eliminated a huge chunk of consumers (too much effort required) and has eliminated my capability to get another 4K device (Blu-Ray, AppleTV, Roku, cable/telco provider or otherwise) since there is ONLY ONE PORT on the Onkyo and on the Samsung. In fact, I could not find a model in the current Onkyo line-up that supports 2 inputs to the receiver that are HDCP 2.2 compliant (perhaps a physical way to prevent stream copies)-and Onkyo is definitely leading the industry in video switching. This will definitely slow down 4K as consumers will be forced to choose their local cable/telco (assuming they ever get their crap together) vs. their favorite OTT solution.
