101–110 of 218 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes the Apple TV desirable? It’s $185. Why would I choose it over a Roku $30 or Ultra $80?
The rest of these Roku/Amazon/Google devices are full of advertising and underpowered hardware that results in cluttered and laggy interfaces. The Apple TV interface is completely free of advertising, responsive, and easy to navigate.
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…
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 series of processing steps on my Blu-ray rips which converts the file to Profile 8. For every movie I've tried so far this has been fine, though I've read that some movies lean far too heavily on the FEL and have color problems without it.
I have one of them, and been using it daily since I bought it in 2016. Bought a cheap Bluetooth remote control from AliExpress which was an upgrade over the Logitech Harmony crap I had earlier. If it were to break, knock on wood it won't happen, what options are there? I have tried to look but haven't really found anything that is free of Chinese backdoors and has decent hardware. For just Plex or Jellyfin a N100 box…
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 shortcomings I've encountered are the fault of moronic media companies. Great example: Spectrum (the cable company). These dolts have an Android application with which subscribers can watch content. But it doesn't run on Android TVs. It's called "Spectrum TV." It's so gallingly stupid that I hate rewarding them with money every month.
Oh, and I love how they addressed the goddamned Netflix button. If you so much as LOOK at the remote, Netflix launches in the middle of whatever you're watching. I actually removed the button from the remote entirely.
I love the Shield, compared to even the Chromecast at the time, we noticed a huge difference in colour on the TV. If NVIDIA ever produce a refresh, they'll have my money.
Now if only they would release an updated one.
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…
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 I/O interfaces to add all the extra hardware you'd need to embed it in a panel or STB.
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 g…
Is there even Blu-ray level content available for series that are streaming only? Or is it restricted to just movie releases?
Edit: actually, now that I think of it, having the audio available in our local language instead of English is a boon for the kids. But otherwise, I don’t know why we bother.
I have one of them, and been using it daily since I bought it in 2016. Bought a cheap Bluetooth remote control from AliExpress which was an upgrade over the Logitech Harmony crap I had earlier. If it were to break, knock on wood it won't happen, what options are there? I have tried to look but haven't really found anything that is free of Chinese backdoors and has decent hardware. For just Plex or Jellyfin a N100 box…
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…
I have one of them, and been using it daily since I bought it in 2016. Bought a cheap Bluetooth remote control from AliExpress which was an upgrade over the Logitech Harmony crap I had earlier. If it were to break, knock on wood it won't happen, what options are there? I have tried to look but haven't really found anything that is free of Chinese backdoors and has decent hardware. For just Plex or Jellyfin a N100 box…
I have one of them, and been using it daily since I bought it in 2016. Bought a cheap Bluetooth remote control from AliExpress which was an upgrade over the Logitech Harmony crap I had earlier. If it were to break, knock on wood it won't happen, what options are there? I have tried to look but haven't really found anything that is free of Chinese backdoors and has decent hardware. For just Plex or Jellyfin a N100 box…
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…
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.