It’s my birthday, and I want the upscaling, the single platform, the flexibility (sailing the high seas), but it’s soooo old. $200? IDK
Pi4 and Kodi in the form of OSMC or Libreelec is cheaper and IMO better
The biggest issue with Pi and Kodi setups is the lack of good remotes and sleep/standby. Get a Shield if you want stuff to “just work”.
I bought the Nokia 8010 TV box instead of the shield. I do not know if it’s available in your country. Why? Cheaper and same ish enough.
I like it but “like” is all there is. I do not love it. As most android boxes it is not 100% stable and needs a reboot after a week or so.
I red in several forums the nvidia shield has the same problem.
Tbh the appletv is the wise choice. Stable, more apps, better ecosystem, better soc, more storage. Plex also works on it.
I couldn’t use it unfortunately because my Atmos setup is not arc 2.0 and the appletv only does uncompressed atmos. With arc 1.x it’s only possible to send atmos compressed over dolby digital plus.
I second this, I love my Apple TV. Blazingly fast and stable and the extra features are amazing. Bought a new sound bar the other day, held my iPhone up and it perfectly configured audio latency. The TV itself had trouble communicating with the sound bar over CEC so I told the Apple TV to learn the volume controls from the sound bar remote, took 10 seconds. When I got my TV, the AppleTV used the camera on my phone to configure the picture settings for most accurate colour reproduction. Added a couple notches of saturation because it’s my personal preference, done.
It plays everything I’ve thrown at it via Plex and Jellyfin, no issues. I also have Moonlight for streaming games from my PC via NVidia game stream and Steam Link for whenever Gamestream shits the bed. Just paired up an Xbox controller to the Apple TV, job done.
Oh, and TV OS 17 just came out and added third party VPN support, so if you do have Netflix or whatever, you can change region using a VPN.
I’m not an Apple fan boy but the Apple TV just works and if you already have a modern-ish iPhone (mine’s a 12), it makes it so much better.
Do you have a solution for running movies of off USB or similar with the Apple TV? I sometimes download movies or shows and I don’t want to deal with streaming them from the pc using plex as I always worry that I’m not getting the best quality. I usually plug a usb stick to my smart tv but sometimes it doesn’t pick up on the subtitles.
It’s literally all that is missing from Apple TV for me (plus the VPN thing that was missing). To be able to run media from an external storage.
I stream from my Synology Plex server to Plex on my ATV via Ethernet just fine. Some of my movies are 50GB 4K files and it plays back fine without transcoding.
