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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

#111

Post by Rubberducky1324 »

ziml77 wrote: post #103
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…

> can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL This is the only reason I know about this Ugoos device. I find it so strange that Profile 7 is effectively unsupported outside of Blu-ray players and this one device. It doesn't even seem like it can be a processing power issue because the documentation says that the other profiles have higher maximum pixel rates. I don't have the Ugoos box myself though. Instead I'm running a se…

> I find it so strange that Profile 7 is effectively unsupported outside of Blu-ray players and this one device.

Since DV Profile 7 is only used for Blu-Ray discs, and playing backed up BR copies from a non BR player is not really supported, it kind if makes sense that it's not supported.

For the Ugoos device, I'm not sure, but I thought the chipset inside supports it, but you still need to flash custom firmware (CoreELEC) and provide a Dolby Vision file to unlock this. So it's not supported out of the box.

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

#112

Post by VerifiedReports »

scrollop wrote: post #110
VerifiedReports wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen in forums where people asked this, the answer is: nothing. I only have two devices providing material to my media system: a Shield Pro and a Blu-Ray player. The Shield is the critical element, used daily for streaming and playing local media from a USB-connected SSD. I hope Nvidia revises the Shield with up-to-date hardware and maintains its flexible nature. It's a pretty cool product. The biggest…

Netflix button fix- Get the app "button mapper" (or similar name) On the free version, you can configure the button for- one click of the netflix button to open Plex, and 2 clicks to open something else (eg youtube). This also works when the shield and TV are off- One click of the netflix button turns on the shield, which turns on the tv.

Thanks. I should get around to just remapping it. I've had to replace my original remote, and the new one still has the Netflix button.

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

#113

Post by Rubberducky1324 »

compsciphd wrote: post #66
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…

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).

The problem with this setup will sadly be that WideVine / DRM stuff will not like it, so you're locked to low resolution playback from streaming apps.

Each of these Android set top boxes need to be certified to get high quality playback.

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

#114

Post by Rubberducky1324 »

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…

> 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

This is not true. Streaming from a NAS at high speeds is fully supported and works fine. I would suggest to use NFS over SMB though, SMB gives me issues for higher bitrate content

Streaming apps do indeed not work. It's a device for local / NAS media playback.

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

#116

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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.

Yet Microsoft figured this out decades ago.

I (well my mom) had a supported with security updates version of Windows 7 on my 2007 Mac Mini (not a typo) until 2023.

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

#117

Post by pjmlp »

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.

It is called a legal binding contract, business use it all the time to enforce support.

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

#118

Post by AstroNutt »

joe_mamba wrote: post #61
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 lo…

I rooted my old S3 probably around 2016 I had laying around. There was an exploit called "let it rain" and that got me root access. Then on XDA Developers I found several custom ROM'S. Someone even created a Nougat ROM for that thing later on. That was the last version I was able to load on it. I sure did learn a lot back then.

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

#119

Post by mrandish »

avidiax wrote: post #106
mrandish wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to buy a newer, better streaming box than the several I already have but after spending quite a bit of time investigating, the state of Android TV-based streaming boxes & sticks is awful. That's one reason NVidia's Shield (Tegra X1 SoC) is still well-regarded despite being a circa 2015 design (the 2019 rev was just a cost reduce/bug fix with the same performance). Beyond that your choices are to either stick…

What is it about mobile phone chipsets that makes the unsuitable for a TV stick or STB? Is it that there is special TV-specific hardware like tuners, HW accelerated audio and video decoders, and PQ/AQ accelerators? Apple has adapter their A15 chipsets for use in the Apple TV, so it seems possible. But obviously the Apple TV products don't have tuners, aren't driving a display natively, and probably don't have enough…

It's a good question and I'm not actually sure as I'm not a hardware guy, just a user who's looked into these productz. So far, the popular Android TV set-top boxes (or sticks) I've seen use SoCs that seem dedicated to set-top applications. It may that mobile phone chipsets have different integration to support cellular modems and air interfaces.

There are some boxes which use use Android instead of Android TV but these tend to require using versions of the streaming apps made for mobile phones. I haven't really looked into these as they tend not to work well with remote controls so I haven't been interested.

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

#120

Post by jnaina »

aaravchen wrote: post #68
Hamuko wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure what you are on about. AppleTV with InFuse handles all/most codecs. Best media player in the market bar none.
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