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Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

arstechnica.com

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Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#61

Post by joe_mamba »

boricj wrote: post #56

That reminds me of my own Samsung Galaxy SII. Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1, then I switched to CyanogenMod until my father rage-bought me a new phone in 2016 because it crashed so much he had trouble contacting me. I still kept it up to date with LineageOS and then unofficial versions for fun (it's at Android 13 last I checked). Do I expect a Samsung Galaxy SII to…

>That reminds me of my own Samsung Galaxy SII. Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1

Even that was amazing for Samsung's standards back then.

For example my former Samsung Note II shipped with Android 4.1.1 Jellybean and they only supported it till 4.4.2 KitKat. Just let that sink in. I basically bought a flagship e-waste device.

Custom ROMs didn't help much since you'd lose S-pen functionality if you went past 4.4.2 as modders couldn't port the needed firmware blobs past that kernel or something like that.

Oh, and also, using custom ROMs could brick your wifi from working as the FW of the wifi chip was tied to Knox tripping the e-fuse on custom ROMs, so then you'd need to use some voodoo to patch wifi back. That is, if you were lucky and your phone wouldn't brick itself due to the FW bug in Samsung's eMMC, that would lock itself to read-only mode out of nowhere.

Seriously, fuck Samsung for that PoS phone, fuck them in the a**. That phone should have been a lemon recall with full refund to consumers.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#62

Post by drnick1 »

It's nice that you can unlock the bootloader on these and flash Lineage if you want to limit snooping by Google.

That being said, I think that you get more flexibility and performance with a mini PC and and air mouse. For one, stock (Googled) Android does not give you an easy way to use a browser with an ad-blocker, which is still the best way to stream from many sources without ads. Also all these anemic Android boxes struggle with high bitrate 4K videos.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#63

Post by drnick1 »

raggi wrote: post #39

I love my shield, it’s been a staple. If they wanted to really knock it out the park, the next step would be a steamos port with DRM support.

DRM is anti-consumer malware, so I hope not.

There are other ways to source videos than paying a monthly fee forever for something that you will never own.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#64

Post by aaravchen »

drnick1 wrote: post #62

It's nice that you can unlock the bootloader on these and flash Lineage if you want to limit snooping by Google. That being said, I think that you get more flexibility and performance with a mini PC and and air mouse. For one, stock (Googled) Android does not give you an easy way to use a browser with an ad-blocker, which is still the best way to stream from many sources without ads. Also all these anemic Android box…

You unfortunately lose Widevine support when you do this though (either switching to LineageOS or a mini-PC). That means you can't stream any of the mainstream services in anything like a half-decent quality.

It's very unfortunate that every streaming service has given up on supporting anything except Google-fied Android and Apple iOS/tvOS. I dont like the services to begin with, but a fully Jellyfin stack can only get you so far when there are niche requests involved as well.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#65

Post by aaravchen »

safeimp wrote: post #23
akersten wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of hardware support for a few modern codecs is a pretty big complaint from me, but nothing else out there is decent :/

It depends what you're looking for. In the AV enthusiast circles a lot of people flock towards the Ugoos AM6B Plus (with CoreELEC). It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it. That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead y…

The unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server, and you definitely can't use any streaming services.

I'm constantly surprised how many people are in that narrow category of just dipping thier toe in the water for "self-hosted" content that it's little enough it fits on disk storage you can have in your living room (mine is a half-height server rack in the basement), but also have progressed past thr point of using any streaming services. I guess there are a lot of people without families that also never travel out there.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#66

Post by compsciphd »

safeimp wrote: post #23
akersten wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of hardware support for a few modern codecs is a pretty big complaint from me, but nothing else out there is decent :/

It depends what you're looking for. In the AV enthusiast circles a lot of people flock towards the Ugoos AM6B Plus (with CoreELEC). It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it. That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead y…

I have an am6b+ but in reality the shield is a much nicer device to use if one wants to use anything outside of their local media.

I actually wish we could run android in a container on the CoreELEC side and switch back and forth between Kodi and the android UI/apps (without needing a reboot, and having a better managed android environment than the provided one).

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#67

Post by compsciphd »

aaravchen wrote: post #65
safeimp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what you're looking for. In the AV enthusiast circles a lot of people flock towards the Ugoos AM6B Plus (with CoreELEC). It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it. That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead y…

The unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server, and you definitely can't use any streaming services. I'm constantly surprised how many people are in that narrow category of just dipping thier toe in the water for "self-hosted" content that it's little enough it fits on disk storage you can have in…

I used it with plex (in kodi) just fine. With that said, I'd agree that its mostly for local media (where local can be whatever plex can get to). Outside of plex, either you are using plain kodi or some simple kodi extensions (say youtube) that just aren't as nice to use as their android app equivalents (in regards to streaming services, it does support MLB.TV for those that like baseball, but again, not quite as nice an experience IMO as the android app).

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#68

Post by aaravchen »

Hamuko wrote: post #52
akersten wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of hardware support for a few modern codecs is a pretty big complaint from me, but nothing else out there is decent :/

The Apple TV's pretty good. I imagine I'd have a hard time switching to a Shield TV unless it gets a CPU bump, whereas Apple still keeps making newer models with modern-ish phone SoCs.

I've looked at this a few times, and AppleTV actually has pretty poor support unless you're only using a select few streaming services and not streaming any of your own content. Shield performs exponentially better in every way except for the god awful stock interface (and Google data collection vs Apple data collection). The hardware and tvOS still have extremely limited support for most video codecs, no support at all for audio pass thru, and very limited non-stereo audio options. If you want the equivalent of watching on your laptop it's good, but if you have better than stereo speakers, or a 4K TV that supports HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, AppleTV can't compete except for the big name streaming services that have special tvOS privileges/integration.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#69

Post by aaravchen »

TuringNYC wrote: post #36

I love the NVIDIA Shield as a technical product...but...I really wish they spent some effort on User Experience.

Search a bit and you'll find how to install Projectivity/Projectivy Launcher that's way way better. For bonus points and a lot snapper functionality you can go the extra mile and use adb to remove the old Google Launcher and the related bloatware.

Re: Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device

#70

Post by IshKebab »

wronglebowski wrote: post #51

Everyone is missing the why here, this only happens because the whole stack is vertically integrated. Even if say LG wanted to make a box like this and update it for 10 years they couldn’t, they don’t make the chips. Qualcomm straight up refuses to support chips through this many Android releases. Even if device manufacturers want to support devices forever it won’t matter if the actual SoC platform drops support.

If you read the article the actual "why" is because the CEO personally requested it and gave an effectively unlimited budget.
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