> 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.

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.