Questions about 4K on the new Fire TV
"So I understand that the new Fire TV is 4K compatible. I have some 4K video files that my LG TV isn't capable of playing (says File Type not supported). I can normally play them on my TV by putting on my Surface Pro 3 and connecting it to the HDMI. Would it be able to just plug a USB stick into the new Fire TV and play them."
"Amazon claims that the Fire TV supports 4K but this is only half true. The new fire TV can barley output 4k. When you launch a 4k video it has to close other system applications like the main menu to allow it to output in 4k. When a video is playing the system also becomes noticeably slower. So what this means is the UI is not in 4k and user applications are not in 4k (plex, games, etc)."
Although Amazon has officially claimed that the new Amazon Fire TV has perfect capability to handle 4K videos. However, a lot of people still complain that they have great difficulty to stream and play 4K videos on this new Fire TV. This problem can be caused by codec incompatibility issue since the file formats supported by Amazon Fire TV 2 are very limited as below:
Video: H.263, H.264, MPEG4-SP, VC1
Audio: AAC, AC-3, E-AC-3, HE-A, PCM, MP3
Therefore, if the 4K video you are going to watch on Amazon Fire TV 2 are in H.265, XAVC S, MXF, FLV, etc format, it is no double that the new Amazon Fire TV 2 will not recognize them.
Besides that, even Amazon Fire TV 2 can read the 4K video you play on it, you may find that the 4K video plays back very choppy. This is due to the immense processing power required to play 4K. To achieve a more smooth playback effect, it is more preferable to downscale 4K to 1080p to eliminate video playback choppy problems.
It would be a waste of time to find one app to perform the video conversion and another app to compress video file size. For your convenience, we recommend you to download the best 4K Video Converter software called Pavtube Video Converter for Windows/Mac (support Mac El Capitan), which cater to your demands to convert various 4K videos files such as camera/camcorder recorded 4K H.265, XAVC S, MP4, MXF, etc or online downloaded 4K movies or videos to Amazon Fire TV 2 supported file formats listed above. You can also compress 4K to 1080p or much smaller file size for fluent streaming and playback on smartphones, tablets, media players or TVs.
For Blu-ray or DVD collectors, it would be very convenient to fix the issue of streaming Blu-ray/DVD on Amazon Fire TV 2 by downloading Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate for Windows/Mac.
How to stream and play 4K video on Amazon Fire TV 2?
Step 1: Add 4K video files to the program.
Install and launch the program on your computer, click "File" menu, and select "Add Video/Audio" or "Add from folder" to import source 4k video files.
Step 2: Set output format.
Clicking the Format bar, you can choose Amazon Fire TV 2 compatible output format "H.264 HD Video(*.mp4)" under the "HD Video" category.
Step 3: Compress 4K to 1080p.
Open "Profile Settings" window, click "Size(pix)" to select 1920*1080 as the final resolution for output video.
Step 4: Start video conversion process.
When all the setting is completed, go back to the main interface, hit right-bottom "Convert" button to convert and downscale 4K video to Amazon Fire TV 2 best compatible H.264 HD MP4 format with 1080p resolution.
