NVidia Shield TV thread

[BoredSysAdmin]

After years and years of shilling for this device on these forums, I finally took a plunge late last year and bought the NVidia Shield TV Pro model.
I only started using it for a few days and my experience is limited so far, but I will share some of the older streamers and experience with Shield in comparison.

My very first HTPC was a mini-ITX DIY Atom 330/ION-based box encased in a fairly small box. Based on the Zotac 1st ION platform. I think I used openElec/Kodi Back then.
Then it was replaced for Asus Atom eePC/ION2 tiny-SFF pc also running OpenElec - slightly faster, but no major improvement. That box ran for quite a long time.
Then came the turn of several MediaTek-based s905x boxes, like Khadas VIM, running OpenElec's fork - LibreElec - these offered very low power. Native H265 decode and HD Audio pass-thru to AVR. Right about this time I switched from getting all of my media managed by Kodi to A Plex server and since that point using exclusively Plex Client on LibreElec/Kodi only as a basic platform.

After few years s905x devs mostly let it stagnate, moving to newer platforms. Around that time I switched to Amazon FireTV 4k dongle and it worked mostly ok for a few years. Having minor issues plus upgraditis kicked in and I splurged on Sheild Pro 2019 model.
Performance: GUI feels much more fluent, responsive than basically any other box I used before, on par with Apple TV 2/3 boxes.
Video decoding - so far everything works. I Will report if I find outliers.
Sound - passthrough seems to be working - it even detected and suggested passthrough all by itself.
Upscaling - this is absolutely unique to Shield and it can perform AI upscaling - it doesn't work on all resolution sources - I wasn't yet able to find a proper 480p source to upscale (cropped resolutions aren't supported), but it does a stellar job upscaling 720p to 1080p.
Remote: BT remote works well. I am getting used to it, feels comfortable to hold, but rewind buttons locations will take getting used to.

Cons: Not much at this point. I guess voice recognition is surprisingly even worse than Alexa's on FireTV. Netflix dedicated button is a minor annoyance as I don't use Netflix, Luckily there is a way to reprogram that button to Plex, I just haven't tried it yet.

 

[panteragstk]

After years and years of shilling for this device on these forums, I finally took a plunge late last year and bought the NVidia Shield TV Pro model.
I only started using it for a few days and my experience is limited so far, but I will share some of the older streamers and experience with Shield in comparison.

My very first HTPC was a mini-ITX DIY Atom 330/ION-based box encased in a fairly small box. Based on the Zotac 1st ION platform. I think I used openElec/Kodi Back then.
Then it was replaced for Asus Atom eePC/ION2 tiny-SFF pc also running OpenElec - slightly faster, but no major improvement. That box ran for quite a long time.
Then came the turn of several MediaTek-based 905x boxes, like Khadas VIM, running OpenElec's fork - LibreElec - these offered very low power. Native H265 decide and HD Audio pass-thru to AVR. Right about this time I switched from getting all of my media managed by Kodi to A Plex server and since that point using exclusively Plex Client on LibreElec/Kodi only as a basic platform.

After few years 905x devs mostly let it stagnate, moving to newer platforms. Around that time I switched to Amazon FireTV 4k dongle and it worked mostly ok for a few years. Having minor issues plus upgraditis kicked in and I splurged on Sheild Pro 2019 model.
Performance: GUI feels much more fluent, responsive than basically any other box I used before, on par with Apple TV 2/3 boxes.
Video decoding - so far everything works. I Will report if I find outliers.
Sound - passthrough seems to be working - it even detected and suggested passthrough all by itself.
Upscaling - this is absolutely unique to Shield and it can perform AI upscaling - it doesn't work on all resolution sources - I wasn't yet able to find a proper 480p source to upscale (cropped resolutions aren't supported), but it does a stellar job upscaling 720p to 1080p.
Remote: BT remote works well. I am getting used to it, feels comfortable to hold, but rewind buttons locations will take getting used to.

Cons: Not much at this point. I guess voice recognition is surprisingly even worse than Alexa's on FireTV. Netflix dedicated button is a minor annoyance as I don't use Netflix, Luckily there is a way to reprogram that button to Plex, I just haven't tried it yet.

Shield TV's are like dogs/children. You can't have just one.

You'll try to use another TV that doesn't have one and get another one. Then you'll have 3 and a new one with new features will come out and you'll want to buy that one too.

Or is that just me?

Nice overview. It's difficult to find flaws at this point given our use of Plex, especially since they finally fixed HDR>SDR conversion. That fix removed my need for an HTPC or any other box.

Even if you do prefer Kodi, it works wonderfully (most of their dev effort is apparently toward Android at this point).

 

[Alex2507]

Well, well, well ... it's just a click away.

Is this the way?

Edit: along with one of these OTA DVR toys.

I guess I'm about to find out 'cause I'm done f^%&in' around.