Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
Obviously, a Fire tablet will not display 4k. It doesn't have the sceen resolution to do that. However, I would expect that it would down convert it to something it could play. But does the CPU have enough horsepower to do the down convert in real time? Again, I expect that it would, because it only has to down convert fast enough to support normal speed viewing. But I guess that's a question for Amazon. Also, if you're slinging 4k videos at the Fire tablet, that's going to consume a lot of network bandwidth and local storage for video information that you will just be throwing away. Still, that might be better than spending years and years converting all your 4k videos manually on your computer and cooking its CPU. If you're interested in streaming rather than playing local content, look into the Plex media server, as it will down convert on the fly as it streams. This does not take anywhere near the horsepower that manual down converting "all at once" does.
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I already have Plex. Alas, I don't have a fast enough CPU to reliably *decode* 4K H.265/HEVC in real-time much less transcode it. The PC can do 4K H.264/AVC decode/transcode but H.265/HEVC is a different beast altogether. CPU's 7 years old and at that time, Intel has barely even added full support for H.264 to their integrated graphics. Plus, PC's somewhat prone to overheating now. Hasn't been much of a concern since its primary use is Calibre and I don't do any complicated conversions.
The question here is if the chipset in the Fire HD supports hardware decode acceleration. Doing brute-force decode with CPU would kill the battery quite quickly.
I guess network bandwidth is another issue. I can stream UHD66 and UHD100 rips to the iPad on 802.11ac. Fire HD 10 appears to have 802.11ac MIMO so that seems promising. Storage should be fine. 512GB can hold ~8 full UHD rips and I have a 4TB portable HDD for swapping content to the microSD card.