Is a nvidia shield still the best? Are there others? I’d like to play various 4k HDR video files. Which one to buy? Any recommendations? Nvidia shield looks very much outdated but there’s nothing new.
What about plasma bigscreen? Would that be good? I’d just use it for jellyfin, the DE doesn’t matter much.
Bought a Roku and regret it. Should have gotten a shield.
I also have a Roku but still think the value just isn’t there for the Shield. If they updated it, I might consider buying one but I’m not paying full MSRP for a 5 year old device. My Roku doesn’t play everything but it was less than 1/4th the price of the Shield.
Amazon firestick pro.
Too old. Can’t play DV or AVI
Mine does av1… So?
That’s great. Mine does not
You have the older one then
I’ve been rocking a shield pro for years, never had in issue. Still runs butter smooth.
Really? I’m skeptical. Long time shield pro and shield owner and most of us love the thing but it’s kind of a hackers toy and we usually have something to bitch about with it too. Mine needs fairly frequent resets and has some funky ethernet connection behavior and both devices have had some weird behavior with projectivity launcher startup.
Getting to ops point though, I would wait a few months and see what the next apple TV release coming up looks like. Expectations are low but if it doesn’t completely dissapoint, I am actually considering it in hopes of that butter smooth performance.
Interesting, I’ve never had any issues with it really. The only thing I suppose is that Hulu acts odd on a very rare occasion but that’s a Hulu app problem. It’s our main “TV” system. Netflix, Hulu, stremio, prime, etc. are all flawless. I could see it being a hackers toy but I’ve kept it stock. Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi, whatever, has always been flawless. I’ve also only been on WiFi and streaming anything hasn’t been an issue.
Yeah Hulu is buggy on a lot of things but notoriously terrible on Shield and has been for years. It almost feels like they’re trying to break it on Shield. Years of hulu updates and you think one would maybe accidentally improve it’s performance at least. My pro is aging a little better than my shield tube but I’m still partial to the wacky rugged design of the tube.
I have a regular-ass Amazon Fire TV stick 4k max that I use to play my Jellyfin content. It has native hardware support for h.265. I can’t remember the last time it needed a stream transcoded. Of course, it is encumbered with the Amazon ecosystem, but it was cheap.
I also have one of those $20 Walmart Android TV boxes. The UI is a little slow in it but it plays the same Jellyfin content just fine, and you can replace the stock launcher on it with whatever you want.
Is jellyfin good? Several years ago I wrote a very basic php search system and then made another php script to generate a clickable list of every video file in a directory. These 2 put together makes a better than nothing media server that I can use with confidence knowing it’s probably really secure and not sending any data to anyone on the internet.
My setups lan transfer speed is slow all the time for reasons beyond my understanding so I have to find a way to fix that first before I can think about changing my media server software anyway. My 1mb/s download/1.2mb/s upload speed on my server and 4-7mb/s for each other pc is good enough to watch some stuff but it really sucks that after overhead and performance losses, that’s all that’s left of my 400mbits/sec wifi connection. I barely even use it and don’t have any non Linux pcs on my network so it’s not like it’s slow due to actual traffic. Router and wifi card manufacturers are scamming us all. Divide any advertizered wireless network speed by 64 and that’s the maximum you can expect in my experience.
Jellyfin is great. Worth the time and effort to get it setup. Infuse is worth the money as an AppleTv frontend too.
You will definitely need toimprove your lan speed though. I’drecommende getting off WiFi for as much of the media as you can. If not that, put in triband WiFi connection and wire them in if possible. Mesh will work, but bring your speed down.
Does it still have the issue where subtitles will go out of sync with audio?
What is your network infrastructure that is giving you those poor performance numbers?
Most consumer all in one routers are crap but not that bad. the file server should always connect to the main hub of the network with Ethernet (whether that be the router, a switch or an all-in-one crap box), these days pretty much everything should be at least 1gigabit.
Are you trying to use wifi for everything? that’s a recipe for disaster unless you really know what you are doing and have multiple APs and careful signal strength and channel management
I am trying to use wifi for “everything”. I know it’s bad but there is no honest to goodness way I can get ethernet to anything except the router and modem. It’s complicated. Even a 60hz ac to ethernet wall plug transceiver has to go through enough breakers and stuff it’s not worth trying.
I forgot which exact router I have but it’s basically the highest end Cisco home router that works with dd wrt. It usually costs $300 on amazon. My internet connection is dsl but I’m not trying to get higher internet speeds, just higher lan speeds.
If my low effort network setup only yields me a maximum of 7mbytes/sec I’m fine with it I just want to be able to get more than 1 meg per second on the one system that needs it the most.
You should consider upgrading to some kind of mesh system then. sure they aren’t perfect, but even a basic 3 node kit could probably increase your throughput ten fold. If you want to use DDWRT or OpnSense or whatever you can still run it separately and route internet traffic or use it for your DHCP server.
To stream a 4K bluray remux rips on your Lan you need a solid 150mbit minimum between server and player to be reliable for example. I am hardwired all the way except for mobiles, but even on Wi-Fi I can easily pull 400-500mbit real world throughput through most of the house thanks to my Wifi6 setup with multiple APs
Jellyfin is excellent. You can always just download it and run it on whatever you’re running your existing setup on and give it a try. The server’s available for a bunch of platforms.
check that you have at least cat6 cables everywhere and that they are not connected into a slow ethernet port somewhere. MY old wifi router only had a single 10mb/s connection for some reason and it took me a solid minute to figure that shit out. if everything is going through wifi something more complicated is happening and I would first check you’re channel isn’t overlapping any neighbors signals and that you’re not trying to put 5g through any walls.
I’m in a similar boat. While my current setup is getting by, I’m in the market for something better.
I’m hoping that the shield will soon get a refresh when Nintendo releases their next console. If so, I’ll be picking up a shield for sure.
The shield is still the best even if it is old. If you want a cheaper device the “onn” ones Walmart sells are pretty good for the price.
I use an AppleTV 4k. Works great.
Don’t you need an apple device to even sign into it though?
The Apple ecosystem is pretty bad when you only have the 1 thing.
Hmm, not sure I follow the question?
He’s referring to how you need an iPhone or iPad to set up the Apple TV; you can’t sign in to it without one. It’s an odd ‘overlook’ from Apple.
and you always hear good things about them. if it was a stand alone device it could easily be someones first apple product.
You can absolutely set up an AppleTV with no other Apple device in your possession. It is a very good player for many things but much of this is dependent on your choice of application. For compatibility and no transcoding, Infuse is the best I’ve found, provided it’s pointed at a Jellyfin instance. Not a great choice just pointed at a local or cloud SMB share (though possible) as its cache gets cleared frequently.
AFAIK, Shield Pro remains the only option that can play back Atmos from ripped media, but would be happy to be corrected on this.
You don’t need an Apple device to login, it just makes things easier.
making it difficult to use your product seems like a bad business decision tbh
It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just that there is less interacting with the TV keyboard if you use an iPhone/mac/whatever. You can login with a password without any issues.
Hard pass. Apple devices aren’t good in regards to foss or privacy
Well, I will disagree. Apple is one of the best Hardware companies out there for not selling your data. Do they do other things wrong? Absolutely. A slew of things. But selling private data is not one of them.
No matter how good the hardware is as long as it has ios, I wouldn’t touch it.
Not even google sells your data, the keep their precious to themselves.
Just in time another post about apple’s shenanigans. E.g. https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/keeping-your-data-from-apple-is-harder-than-expected
I disagree with that article as well. But you seem vehemently anti-Apple, so I withdraw my recommendation, and I apologize for offering a possible answer to your question.
Apple is one of the best Hardware companies out there for not selling your data.
Don’t believe their ads, they are actually one of the worst!
But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn’t limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it’s proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users’ privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers’ explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:
Can you provide any examples of ads someone (maybe you?) received directly due to Apple’s policies and behavior? Totally serious question.
Can you provide any examples of ads someone (maybe you?) received directly due to Apple’s policies and behavior? Totally serious question.
If you use an iPhone and have app tracking transparency enabled then any targeted ads you’re seeing are almost certainly coming from data that Apple has collected from you.
A few years back Apple made a big change to iOS that prevents user data from being sold to data brokers and ran a big ad campaign about how they are the good “privacy option”. But the reason they made the change was not to protect user privacy, but because Apple wanted the money that Facebook was getting from iPhone users. The same data is still being collected and sold, just by Apple now instead of Facebook. That was the crux of Facebook’s big lawsuit against Apple accusing them of anti-competitive practices.
You mean the ‘Personalized Ads’ option? Why would anyone enable that?
No. Clicking “ask app not to track” prevents apps from collecting your data. It does not prevent Apple from collecting that same data, which they do.
The page you’re linking to is a good read. I had heard about a handful of the problems through the years, but having them presented and precisely explained like this was great, I think.
Neither Android TV on the Shield Pro, are you going to install something like Lineage on the Shield?.
Are there alternative firmwares available for shield?
I found it to be less of a headache to just embrace transcoding. Buy a refrub SFF PC with an 8th gen or better Intel CPU, and enable QuickSync in Jellyfin.
The vero V supports av1. As far as im aware it is the most modern player with support for most every codec (except dolby vision) out there.
Does this just run local content, or does it have a Jellyfin app?
It’s linux / osmc running on it, basically a whole pc. So, yes, it can run external stuff.
If you want to avoid transcoding entirely, a Nvidia Shield is probably your best bet as it supports a few more audio codecs and HDMI passthrough that an Apple TV doesn’t support. That being said, the Nvidia Shield is both more expensive and older than an Apple TV. I would argue that an Apple TV has a better overall experience with third party apps, newer hardware, more up-to-date OS, whereas a Shield works best for Plex/jellyfin.
I bought a Nvidia Shield first to replace a Smart TV and Steam Link and was pretty disappointed with my overall experience. I ended up biting the bullet and getting an Apple TV and the only issue I’ve had is that now TrueHD streams are getting transcoded.
Of course, your experience and desires are probably different so would just suggest looking around for what works best for you.
Thx. Apple TV has no android which is a deal breaker
I have been using an Odroid N2+ with CoreELEC installed and the Jellyfin Kodi plugin for years now.
Plays pretty much everything you throw at it, including 4k HDR HFR.
Dolby Vision is supported in CoreELEC but only on some devices.
Same setup minus jellyfin. You can play directly from your server/nas using NFS, and Kodi will scrape for the meta data and match the show/movie. Now I only use Jellyfin for when I’m out of the house. Worth noting it also does Atmos!
Would HIGHLY recommend the oDroid N2+ with CoreELEC!
Bonus, if you use any *Arr programs, they can also sync to Kodi, for notifications on media added, and to sync and clean Kodi’s database for deleted media.
Kodi still plays via SMB/NFS when configured in direct play mode. Only the metadata is provided via Jellyfin and play progress is synced to Jellyfin.
The Jellyfin plugin is not the most stable piece of software but it gets the job done.
I switched to Jellycon that doesn’t integrate with the Kodi library, but rather acts like other basic Kodi add-ons. You can still browse the Jellyfin library through the add-on in Kodi, and through the Kore app by navigating to add-ons > Jellycon > Content tab, though I mostly initiate media playback from the Jellyfin app on Android. Direct play works too.
I’m curious about this one. I’m running a Radxa Rock 5B with an android TV ROM, but it is a janky experience at best. That has been the main difficult with Radxa’s line of rockchip based SBCs - the software support is lacking. How is the software support for the N2+, and when did it release?
The shield pro 2019 is probably still the best overall, it’s not perfect as there are some weaknesses due to the age of its chipset, but for all the common formats used in Movies and TV it works perfectly, especially if you are playing full remux files, not re-encoded compressed video. Kodi runs very well, Plex runs very well, Jellyfin is mostly perfect too, but has some limitations in the current version.
Yes it supports HDR10 (not10+) and Dolby Vision, which covers 98% of all 4K blurays and TV shows, anything HDR10+ just gets played in HDR10 compatibility mode, if you TV doesn’t do DV it plays the HDR10 layer on 99% of files. There are some issues with HLG as it isnt properly supported but you don’t come across that format all that often and there is usually an SDR or regular HDR version available, if your TV supports manually activating HLG then it works fine.
Yes there is a minor colour bug in some DV content, no it isn’t the end of the world as some people make it out to be.
It is one of the only players that will give you full DTS:X and Dolby Atmos support, it has a very nice configurable upscaler for lower res content (AI upscale on low works excellently with minimal artifacts), it still has a lot going for it despite its age.
Also its easy to decrapify with ADB, you can easily configure third party launchers and other fun stuff.
Thx! That’s a great review. HDR10 compatibility mode sounds good, I assume it doesn’t make too much of a difference. And the HDR layer for DV is great as well.
Seconding the Shield, for all of the above plus Nvidia’s update commitment to it. IIRC the 2015 Shield is the longest continually updated Android device ever. I have a 2015, 2017, and a 2019 at my house, and a couple of 2017s at my parents’ place. I upgraded the older ones to the toblerone remote last year. All are still working great, and continuing to receive regular updates.
