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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

#211

Post by raggi »

Mindwipe wrote: post #54
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.

Unless Valve are going to do some work to enable that and support a hardware backed chain of trust for drivers that's not going to happen. (I think it should happen but that's not the same as that it will.)

The drivers are already done, they're in the Android build.

I just want a more open OS.

I don't mind if it requires running a vendor signed boot, kernel and driver chain, I'd be using those same vendor chains anyway for non upstreamed hardware most likely.

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

#212

Post by expedition32 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #208
School-Cotton wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Sony TV doesn't do this, thankfully

My Samsung Frame TV shows ads in the app bar and you cannot disable/remove them. They can’t even use the Google excuse because the TV runs Samsung’s OWN TizenOS. They’re lucky it’s a good (beautiful) TV..

This doesn't really bother me. I just use my TV to watch Netflix.

Ofcourse Samsung has "sponsored" apps everything does.

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

#213

Post by compsciphd »

aaravchen wrote: post #180
compsciphd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nic…

Him, I hadn't tried running it myself, but I couldn't find any indication if anyone using it for Plex (or equivalent). I only saw people going thru complicated schemes to Terry and setup network shared drives, or directly attaching external harddrives. I stand corrected.

there's a reasonably nice plex kodi addon.

If my entire world was plex, I probably would have kept it as my main device, but I really like a lot of the android streaming apps i use and the experience in kodi land just isn't as good when it exists.

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

#214

Post by compsciphd »

Rubberducky1324 wrote: post #113
compsciphd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

except, I don't care so much about the high quality widevine playback. Plain youtube, MLB.TV and many others don't need certification. yeah netflix does, but that's less important to me.

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

#215

Post by donkeybeer »

jeroenhd wrote: post #169
akdev1l wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They update the roms while keeping everything provided by Qualcomm the same so basically the kernel is frozen even if the android version is updated

The kernel is usually frozen but sometimes projects like PostmarketOS can use the changes to upstream the changes and add general Linux support. Anyone can make a diff between the upstream kernel and the Qualcomm kernel. Maintaining these changes into later versions of the kernel will be quite challenging, but the base is already there. That said, phones also come with plenty of binary drivers and those cannot be por…

What do you think are the reasons pc's don't need Dell xps 13 9350 Windows and Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Linux and so on but phones need Galaxy S26 Linux, Xiaomi 16 Linux and so on?

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

#216

Post by jeroenhd »

donkeybeer wrote: post #215
jeroenhd wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kernel is usually frozen but sometimes projects like PostmarketOS can use the changes to upstream the changes and add general Linux support. Anyone can make a diff between the upstream kernel and the Qualcomm kernel. Maintaining these changes into later versions of the kernel will be quite challenging, but the base is already there. That said, phones also come with plenty of binary drivers and those cannot be por…

What do you think are the reasons pc's don't need Dell xps 13 9350 Windows and Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Linux and so on but phones need Galaxy S26 Linux, Xiaomi 16 Linux and so on?

Because ARM lacks some of the device auto-discovery features that amd64 provides for free, unless you're lucky and use a device with ACPI+DSDTs on ARM. You need a special build for the hardware, but you don't need to alter the source code.

Custom kernels also exist for amd64 devices, often including workarounds and patches that are not in mainline to improve performance or compatibility.

As a vendor, that requires practically zero extra effort.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices has a list of devices that run either mainline or almost-mainline Linux. Only the "downstream" devices require vendor Linux kernels. Of course, hardware support is partial for most of these devices because vendors haven't contributed proper upstreamable drivers and volunteers haven't had the time to write them yet, but it's not like every ARM device needs a special kernel fork, that's just something ARM vendors do out of laziness.

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

#217

Post by joney_baloney »

aaravchen wrote: post #177
joney_baloney wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I have no trouble playing any of my alternatively sourced media, 4K Dolby Vision included, using an app called Infuse. Pass-through audio may indeed be an issue for some lossless surround formats, or at least that's what it sounded like the last I looked into it some years ago. I don't have the right room to set up surrounds so it's stereo only over here anyway. But that said I love the app, lovely interface, e…

When I tried that before, the Infuse UI was unusably show for me, likely due to the library size, streaming from my server hung for a long time, it had to transcode most of the time because so few codecs were supported and it only supported stereo audio output. DV wasn't supported at all at the time. It sounds like it's gotten better by a lot, but I'm curious whether you've had to pay for each newer version if Infuse…

I had to look to remember, I'm on a $10/year subscription for "Pro". From looking at their page I'd say some codec support is under the Pro license. I know I haven't thrown anything at it that needed transcoding, but I'm not playing anything exotic either.

Being annual and pretty cheap I really don't mind throwing them some money to continue development, it's worth it to me for the experience. I can't tell from the website but I feel like there's a monthly option if ya just want to test the waters.

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

#218

Post by mbushey »

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.

Neither Button Mapper nor Buttons Mapper work. You have to disassemble the remote and put a piece of paper or tape between the contacts.
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