Got myself a Nvidia Shield TV

[tongue_of_colicab]

Yesterday my Shield TV got delivered. God be praised for giving us Amazon International because while Japan might have been the Mecca for gadgets in the 80's and 90's it certainly is not these days.

Anyway, I bought it as a replacement for my Intel NUC that is running Kodi. No complaints about Kodi, great piece of software that plays everything you trow at it but there is no remote friendly way of watching Netflix on Windows devices. Yes you can bother with keyboard emulation and whatnot but I was looking for something the girlfriend wouldn't mind using either. I got a FireTV stick as well but switching HDMI outputs each time is a pain.

For the past year or so I've been running Emby as the back end for managing my media collection. At my girlfiriends place we are using a FireTV stick with the Emby app to stream from the Intel NUC. Initially the Emby apps had plenty of issues, no subtitles, streams suddenly stopping etc. but for the past couple of months I've had no issues which made me want to make to jump to an all Emby environment.

As I wanted HD (DTS-HD, Dolbly TrueHD) audio passthrough support there really isn't a alternative for the Shield TV I believe.

I got the 2017 model and it is really small, about the size of your hand. The design is nothing special but I guess most people just tuck it away somewhere anyway.

Speed is really good. Obviously coming from a FireTV stick everything is going to feel fast but stuff like Netflix and Youtube all open quick and navigation is without any lag.

The remote controller feels nice as well. It is kinda thin though. I'm also not that keen on the touch bar for adjusting volume. One other reason for dropping Kodi is that I wanted physical buttons instead of an app on my phone for navigation. It works but it is not as accurate or easy as a physical button so that is a miss in my opinion.

The added controller looks decent enough as well. I've only held it for a short while and didn't play any games with it yet but feel and ergonomy appear decent enough. Not sure about the edgy edges though. Might become a bit uncomfortable holding it for long periods of time. I wouldn't trade a Xbox one controller but can't complain.

The software on the Shield appears good as well. Not too impressed with the home screen that has a lot of junk on there and seems to lack the option to customize it to your needs. You can hide and re-arrange some stuff but that is about it it seems.

The main reason I bought this, for Emby, is still has some issues. Emby uses the default google player and after learning they (google) added support for PGS subtitles to the latest beta I made the jump but now it seems that version has some issues with certain HD audio formats and 10bit video so I'll probably have to go to the latest stable and live without PGS support for a while.

PS. Emby is a good choice if you are looking for software to manage your media around the house. Most people are probably using Plex but Emby is really coming along well and the devs are actually active on the forum listing to people. I used Plex only for a little bit but the server interface was terrible IMO. Plex apps probably have the edge on Emby, certainly when it comes to the amount of devices that are supported, but overall Emby does a good job.

Seems that after Plex introduced a bunch of not so privacy friendly rules a "lot" of people are also jumping on Emby.

Gonna watch my first tv show on it tonight so lets see how it holds up

 

[Malo]

I bought a Shield TV recently as well to go in my kids playroom. The rest of my house has windows PCs for the HTPCs but I wanted to try it out as an alternative, something a bit easier for the kids to use, has easy Netflix/Amazon and other services support out of the box and that I can still run Kodi on to attach to my SQL + NAS Kodi server. Kodi was a bit more difficult to setup since I had to add a custom xml to the user folder on the Shield to support the MySQL server for the library (17 versions later no UI for mysql setup??) but once that was done I had my Kodi collection all working perfectly. Kodi is fantastic because it handles all the codecs for video and audio and does passthrough or resampling for you without anything extra.

I'm impressed with the Shield so far but I haven't done a lot with it yet. It's good to know when I move to 4k it will do that. I want to play with game streaming from my PC as well.

As I wanted HD (DTS-HD, Dolbly TrueHD) audio passthrough support there really isn't a alternative for the Shield TV I believe.

Not sure what you mean by this? As in non-windows devices alternatives?

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

As in non-windows devices, yes. Not sure about Apple but as far as Android based boxes goes the Shield seems to be by far the best.

Is there a reason why you are using SQL instead of Emby or Plex as a back-end? I eventually went with Emby as it seemed so much easier to setup and maintain (their meta data editor is great) without any downsides. The Emby for Kodi plugin integration is pretty much perfect. You can't tell the difference between a normal Kodi setup and one using Emby.

Kodi is great because it plays everything but I think the interface isn't ideal for normal users. Its too easy to end up in all kind of setting'ish menus.

 

[Davros]

Google Assistant Released For NVIDIA's SHIELD TV;

 

[Malo]

Is there a reason why you are using SQL instead of Emby or Plex as a back-end? I eventually went with Emby as it seemed so much easier to setup and maintain (their meta data editor is great) without any downsides. The Emby for Kodi plugin integration is pretty much perfect. You can't tell the difference between a normal Kodi setup and one using Emby.

Habit? I setup my SQL backend many years ago and I've just been using that the whole time. Perhaps I should try out Emby.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Habit? I setup my SQL backend many years ago and I've just been using that the whole time. Perhaps I should try out Emby.

Definitely. I never used the SQL back end but I cant imagine it is as flexible or easy to use as Emby. It doesn't even take 5 minutes to get set up. Just download the server, install, point it to your media and as long as your media has common naming conventions it should just pick everything up. And install the app/Kodi plugin of course. I only had some problems with foreign movies where it either didn't recognize the name or mixed it up with a American movie with the same name but that is easily fixed as you can just edit the meta data, put in the IMDB or movieDB ID and it will scan the correct movie.

- Account (including parental control etc.) are set up in seconds
- Editing meta data including subtitles, images etc. can all be done from the browser or the android/iphone app.
- New content is obviously scanned and added automatically
- Watched data saved across devices
- Remote access and syncing of your media
- Plays on pretty much everything but just be careful you don't end up transcoding everything when using a phone or web browser. Kodi won't need that though. The Shield TV is currently fine with everything apart from PGS subs (already working in beta)

Just keep in mind the Emby apps require you to either buy the app or server "license". The apps are 5 dollars I believe but if you get the server license all apps are unlocked for free. The Kodi plugin is free.

 

[Malo]

They have a Synology NAS version of the server, awesome. I'm going to try it out. I don't mind buying it if it's very useful for me. I don't see anything about an Emby server license though, only Emby Premiere for $5/month.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Premiere is what I was talking about. They got yearly and lifetime subscriptions as well.

I've only tried the windows version but I guess the synology version should be easy to set up as well.

 

[BRiT]

They have an official Docker container for Emby, so if you want to run it on unRaid or other Linux or BSD flavors you can.