I have one of them, and been using it daily since I bought it in 2016. Bought a cheap Bluetooth remote control from AliExpress which was an upgrade over the Logitech Harmony crap I had earlier.
If it were to break, knock on wood it won't happen, what options are there? I have tried to look but haven't really found anything that is free of Chinese backdoors and has decent hardware. For just Plex or Jellyfin a N100 box or similar could do, but I want easy launch of HBO, YouTube etc. And I need that remote control option.
Everyone is missing the why here, this only happens because the whole stack is vertically integrated. Even if say LG wanted to make a box like this and update it for 10 years they couldn’t, they don’t make the chips. Qualcomm straight up refuses to support chips through this many Android releases. Even if device manufacturers want to support devices forever it won’t matter if the actual SoC platform drops support.
> Even if device manufacturers want to support devices forever it won’t matter if the actual SoC platform drops support.
Yeah, so that's not a why, that's a how (and it's not necessary or sufficient anymore, see the Samsung and Pixel reference).
The why seems very much what the article covers.
While the vertical integration is definitely the best way to get it done, it's not strictly required as long as there is good enough documentation for a platform. Linux originally supported Intel without any Intel engineers even knowing it existed.
Also consider Apple's chips, which have gotten Linux support without Apple ever submitting a single line of code.
While Qualcomm's behaviour is definitely a massive bummer (not to mention Qualcomm's competitors), it doesn't stop manufacturers from supporting their devices. It merely stops maintaining support from being cheap and easy.
If you read the article the actual "why" is because the CEO personally requested it and gave an effectively unlimited budget.
No need to be rude. The person above is adding a new insight to the conversation.
Vertical integration makes it possible but motivation makes it happen. Where is Samsung's ultra LTS Exynos device?
I've got the OG model, and it's still the main device hooked up to my TV. All my TV streaming goes through it (mostly Jellyfin these days), and it can stream games no problem via Moonlight.
It's hooked up to a 4k LG TV, and I have no idea about how it does the upscaling, but 720p content looks perfectly fine on it.
Best (worst?) of all... it still gets updates.
Yeah I just loved the one where they forced ads on the homescreen. Now I use ProjectIvy
+1 for Projectivy.
After the ADHD-inducing default Android TV interface, Projectivy is just beautifully clean and simple.
I have quite a few Android TV (or are they called Google TV these days?) devices, and they all get the Projectivy makeover. The TCL TV running Android needs some 'adb' commands run so that the users selection of launcher is maintained across reboots, bit other than that it's been smooth.
The only two complaints about mine is the one set of updates about 5 years ago that killed every connection to my NAS, and that the auto skip function for credits doesn't know if there are scenes after the credits.
But overall, for running it for like 9 years with a cost of less than $200 and essentially zero maintenance, the shield is awesome.
I thought the Shield's claim to fame was it was a certified 4K Android TV device because it could handle it early on?
The Steam Link, also from 2015, is also still receiving updates! My partner and I use ours regularly to play co-op games on our TV. I really appreciate the efforts of whomever is keeping it running.
Steam Link is one of the greatest hardware releases of all time.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to extend to the other Shield products. My Nvidia Shield tablet hasn't had an update in many years.
Then again, this is probably why it is still fast :-P
I'm using it pretty much daily as an ebook reader and sometimes i use it to watch videos on bed by transcoding them on my PC (the hardware isn't that good to decode modern formats). Amusingly, these days i use it much more than back when it was new :-P. I keep it offline though (mainly to avoid wasting battery, there isn't anything in it i'd care if it caught malware by net osmosis somehow) and transfer files via a USB cable.
No thanks. Downgraded to 8.2.3 years ago and going strong with a custom launcher. Has absolutely everything I need and nothing that I don’t.
This was the guide back then, possibly still works. [0]
That reminds me of my own Samsung Galaxy SII.
Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1, then I switched to CyanogenMod until my father rage-bought me a new phone in 2016 because it crashed so much he had trouble contacting me. I still kept it up to date with LineageOS and then unofficial versions for fun (it's at Android 13 last I checked).
Do I expect a Samsung Galaxy SII to do as well with 2026 software as it did in 2013? No, but I can run a 2013 computer with 2026 software without needing to track down dodgy homebrews on xdaforums.com and that reflects badly on the smartphone ecosystem.
>That reminds me of my own Samsung Galaxy SII. Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1
Even that was amazing for Samsung's standards back then.
For example my former Samsung Note II shipped with Android 4.1.1 Jellybean and they only supported it till 4.4.2 KitKat. Just let that sink in. I basically bought a flagship e-waste device.
Custom ROMs didn't help much since you'd lose S-pen functionality if you went past 4.4.2 as modders couldn't port the needed firmware blobs past that kernel or something like that.
Oh, and also, using custom ROMs could brick your wifi from working as the FW of the wifi chip was tied to Knox tripping the e-fuse on custom ROMs, so then you'd need to use some voodoo to patch wifi back. That is, if you were lucky and your phone wouldn't brick itself due to the FW bug in Samsung's eMMC, that would lock itself to read-only mode out of nowhere.
Seriously, fuck Samsung for that PoS phone, fuck them in the a**. That phone should have been a lemon recall with full refund to consumers.
I have had two for 10 years and have no complaints whatsoever
The lack of hardware support for a few modern codecs is a pretty big complaint from me, but nothing else out there is decent :/
It depends what you're looking for. In the AV enthusiast circles a lot of people flock towards the Ugoos AM6B Plus (with CoreELEC).
It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it.
That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead you boot to CoreELEC from an SD card and use Kodi.
> can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL
This is the only reason I know about this Ugoos device. I find it so strange that Profile 7 is effectively unsupported outside of Blu-ray players and this one device. It doesn't even seem like it can be a processing power issue because the documentation says that the other profiles have higher maximum pixel rates.
I don't have the Ugoos box myself though. Instead I'm running a series of processing steps on my Blu-ray rips which converts the file to Profile 8. For every movie I've tried so far this has been fine, though I've read that some movies lean far too heavily on the FEL and have color problems without it.
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 unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server, and you definitely can't use any streaming services.
I'm constantly surprised how many people are in that narrow category of just dipping thier toe in the water for "self-hosted" content that it's little enough it fits on disk storage you can have in your living room (mine is a half-height server rack in the basement), but also have progressed past thr point of using any streaming services. I guess there are a lot of people without families that also never travel out there.
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 nice an experience IMO as the android app).
CoreELEC is a godsend for FEL compatibility, IMO. With a little luck, you can get a device to do FEL for under $100, and you don't have to deal with some random, poorly maintained Android release that probably won't keep up with security updates, etc.
The Apple TV's pretty good. I imagine I'd have a hard time switching to a Shield TV unless it gets a CPU bump, whereas Apple still keeps making newer models with modern-ish phone SoCs.
I've looked at this a few times, and AppleTV actually has pretty poor support unless you're only using a select few streaming services and not streaming any of your own content. Shield performs exponentially better in every way except for the god awful stock interface (and Google data collection vs Apple data collection). The hardware and tvOS still have extremely limited support for most video codecs, no support at all for audio pass thru, and very limited non-stereo audio options. If you want the equivalent of watching on your laptop it's good, but if you have better than stereo speakers, or a 4K TV that supports HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, AppleTV can't compete except for the big name streaming services that have special tvOS privileges/integration.
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, etc.
> a 4K TV that supports HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, AppleTV
You can play HDR10+ 4K on Apple TV using Infuse[0] (and whatever DLNA server you want to stand up with your content.)
[0] Since 2017, apparently.
I stream all of my own content with an Apple TV and Plex just fine. I don't know what problems you've had there. It even handles exotic stuff like Hi10P h.264.
What makes the Apple TV desirable? It’s $185. Why would I choose it over a Roku $30 or Ultra $80?
The rest of these Roku/Amazon/Google devices are full of advertising and underpowered hardware that results in cluttered and laggy interfaces. The Apple TV interface is completely free of advertising, responsive, and easy to navigate.
Apple TV's way beefier hardware, but let's not pretend it doesn't also have advertising.
High end model is $150 (US). Very fast and yes Apple gets some of your info but it's not getting resold to advertisers and 3rd parties. Generally speaking doesn't require adware to keep the price low.
It's a lot faster.
The Shield TV's cylindrical form factor could use a rethink. It is hard to find a good spot for it on a shelf when cords are connected at both ends (HDMI and MMC slot at one end, power and LAN at the other) and the ports are too close for all cords to use right-angle-heads. Leaving it invisible by placing it on the floor or behind other gear sometimes impedes Bluetooth signal, so there it sits, well apart from the AVR, BD, other devices.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster blessed you with CAD and a 3D printer for such tasks.
The solution to it being clunky can't be to add mass to it. Unless you're proposing transferring the internals to a new case and facing all the ports to the back. Seriously, look at this thing. The best thing you can do is tie-wrap the cables together.
That is the new Shield TV design from 2019. The original Shield TV and the Pro were flat design. Strange that they changed it when old design worked well.
I have a 2019 and it's flat.
I think that's because you have the Pro version.
It's nice that you can unlock the bootloader on these and flash Lineage if you want to limit snooping by Google.
That being said, I think that you get more flexibility and performance with a mini PC and and air mouse. For one, stock (Googled) Android does not give you an easy way to use a browser with an ad-blocker, which is still the best way to stream from many sources without ads. Also all these anemic Android boxes struggle with high bitrate 4K videos.
You unfortunately lose Widevine support when you do this though (either switching to LineageOS or a mini-PC). That means you can't stream any of the mainstream services in anything like a half-decent quality.
It's very unfortunate that every streaming service has given up on supporting anything except Google-fied Android and Apple iOS/tvOS. I dont like the services to begin with, but a fully Jellyfin stack can only get you so far when there are niche requests involved as well.
> That means you can't stream any of the mainstream services in anything like a half-decent quality.
Maybe, but I don't think it's a big loss, and the *arr suite works just fine as a substitute.
I'd buy one if they made a new one, but I guess thats basically the hardware the switch uses
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.
DRM is anti-consumer malware, so I hope not.
There are other ways to source videos than paying a monthly fee forever for something that you will never own.
Yeah, but when your daughter wants to watch Moana 2, that tends to stop being an issue.
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.)
It could be really interesting if they used a fraction of the tech they have or recently stopped using that could still fit here well.
I love the NVIDIA Shield as a technical product...but...I really wish they spent some effort on User Experience.
Search a bit and you'll find how to install Projectivity/Projectivy Launcher that's way way better. For bonus points and a lot snapper functionality you can go the extra mile and use adb to remove the old Google Launcher and the related bloatware.
If memory serves the launcher/ui is out of their control. It is GoogleTVs launcher and they are forced to use it.
It should be possible to install a alternative launcher that is preferable.
The reality though, is that there's likely bigger fish being chased.
What a new model would need is more compat with DV and better software. Get rid of the Android ads. Add better frame rate matching. Etc.
My Nvidia Shield Portable is sad to hear this. They updated it to Lollipop 5.1 and then killed it. Pretty much useless now.
That was such a cool device. Running emulators on it was a blast. When I got my Steam Deck it immediately reminded me of the Nvidia Shield Portable.
My shield bricked itself after just a few months, so YMMV on this. No rhyme or reason why.
Mine did as well after an update but thankfully i was within the return/replace window at bestbuy. Ive just never updated it (5 years) and it’s been awesome to use with jellyfin and streaming games from the pc.
Shield TV + extra storage + HDHomeRun tuner is still a great device for getting OTA TV.
The only downside is that more recent versions use the Google Android TV launcher which is filled with a garbage truck full of ads, often for things I would never want to watch (horror movies? Nope!). Yes you can replace the launcher, but that's a pain.
Would love to pay more for a device that has updated codec support, no ads or tracking, and is basically identical.
If plex was smart they’d sell a little box of their own and ditch all this faux-social media nonsense they’re slowly implementing. I do not care at all what my friends are watching. Not one bit. Just make it connect to servers. People are happy to pay for it clearly. How many beelinks have been sold just to run Jellyfin/Plex? I’d gladly buy a plex box for $100 - talk about a great Christmas present for friends and family!
Sidebar: I like Jellyfin but it is nowhere as turnkey as Plex. Otherwise I’d advocate for that too. That being said, I am slowly trying to get mine nice and stable and user-friendly because the way Plex is going does not give me great confidence about the next 2 to 3 years. But at least right now, it is by far the best experience out there.
Free momentum with a name like PlexBox, too.
I get I have no research or anything to back this up and maybe it’s a terrible idea ultimately, but based on the number of low tech literacy people I know personally who are either running their own Plex servers or attaching to others, an even more turnkey simple piece of hardware seems like something that could do reasonably well.
Boxee tried to do both the box (which was literally called "Box") and the social media, and now it's dead.
I wanted to do this and got a Shield last year but returned it because of a live TV bug with the Android Plex client. The programming guide stopped working and could only be fixed by restarting the app, but on Android quitting to the home screen keeps the app running and you can't force quit without going into menus. Sadly that's the OS and changing a launcher didn't fix it.
Actually you can double tap the home button on your remote to see all apps currently running, and can then click the close button on any one of them.
Google TV apps leak memory like a sieve, so it's pretty common to need to manually close all other apps to make the one you're trying to use work. Even !y wife just dies of now as soon as any one of the apps starts acting up.
replacing launcher is gonna take you 10-15mins. 30 max if you aren’t a complete fool.
Projectivy has turned out to be my favourite launcher for the Shield TV after trying a bunch. It displays only the things I want to see, and has a great deal of options.
A million times this. I was so frustrated with how slow and ad-laden the default Shield launcher was. When I got it, it had no ads and was really snappy. Changing over to Projectivy (or any custom launcher really) fixed so many issues and made the device snappy again.
Throwing in my recommendation for the ultra minimalist Flauncher.
Oh, I've seen instructions, most of them start with "enable dev mode, then use adb to run ton of inscrutable commands that may or may not break the system over time".
Overall, it seems like a recipe to end up in an unknown state where you can no longer easily get updates and the only recovery is to wipe the system.
I've seen similar methods to "Clean up Windows 11", and it always seems like you're just putting the device into an unknown state. A few ads you can become blind to is not as bad as a totally broken system.
It does seem sketchy, but you can kind of guess what it's cleaning based on the name in the uninstall command. I just skim down to the section that says it's for removing the launcher and reqd those, then run only a few. The upside of the launcher thing is that you can setup a new default launcher and use it for a while without doing any adb. That let's you verify it's working for you first. And when you do finally remove the Google one, a lit if the ad and nloatware stuff no longer runs in the background even if you haven't removed it, so it's abh8ge perf0rmance benefit.
If you are uncomfortable with ADB on the CLI, you can look up the subject ''Debloat++ Shield TV'' as discussed in XDA Forums' Shield TV subforum for how to use an app for that.
Friend, you are #11 on the leaderboard here on HN and you stated that enabled dev mode is too scary. I promise you, you have the skillset to research that your worries are false and you can accomplish this easier than rebutting me on this. I believe in you.
Once your find your comfort, you might even find other items of joy that are being gatekept from you like SmartTube.
Friend, I never said it was scary, only that it was not maintainable and would put your system in an unknown state.
How different is this from say installing Debian, then picking out a bunch of globally installed software that supports "make install" and spraying files all over the root filesystem, then expecting the next run of "apt update" to work properly without things breaking?
Maybe my concerns are unwarranted, but the vast majority of Android mangling I've done over the years has not generally resulted in long-term stability, for a variety of reasons. Recall that the point of this article is that it's 10 year old hardware still in support!
It’s a single app. several are open source. I recommend flauncher. Once again, you are overly complicating a process that you do not know and are arguing from a point of ignorance. As you point out, it’s a 10 year old platform. It’s very stable and known. I am done trying to let you see what you are not interested in.
It's sad how few competitors have come out in a decade.
Now if only they would release an updated one.
I thought about this but what would it have that is missing? Hardware decoding for newer codec like AV1 is one thing, but what else?
I have two of these one in my living room and one in my bedroom. They are the best devices for playing pirate Emby servers 4k Remuxes with dolby vision and dolby audio support direct play.
A refresh comes out I'm not sure I would buy one.
They're missing support for newer codecs and current WiFi standards, can't decode Dolby Vision FEL, and, unless something had changed recently, they don't keep up on security updates (even if they are pushing out other updates).
I suspect the last point would be true even if they launched new hardware, though.
Also the current hardware has lots of overheating problems that hugely affect performance (you have to re-paste the heat sink to the CPU after only 2 years), and thier Bluetooth antenna is so awful it makes Bluetooth controllers for gaming completely unusable due to lag from lost/dropped packets (and the remote constantly disconnect and reconnect randomly).
In addition to hardware support for more modern codecs, USB C seems to be an easy upgrade, it would also benefit from being able to detect frame rate to auto-switch for the HDMI (this likely needs hardware support).
WPA3 support for one would be nice, so I don't have to create a separate, insecure, SSID just for it.
More horsepower would be nice. More connectivity.
But I think most importantly: confirmation that this isn't a dead end product.
You mean "finished", as in complete
I'd love to buy a newer, better streaming box than the several I already have but after spending quite a bit of time investigating, the state of Android TV-based streaming boxes & sticks is awful. That's one reason NVidia's Shield (Tegra X1 SoC) is still well-regarded despite being a circa 2015 design (the 2019 rev was just a cost reduce/bug fix with the same performance).
Beyond that your choices are to either stick with the same mainstream Google/Amazon/WalMart boxes which are locked down and based on 5+ year-old SoC designs or go with second-tier boxes from Asian vendors on AliExpress/Amazon/eBay, all of which have some different combination of significant compromises:
* Don't work with certain DRM, streaming services or codecs
* Has unreliable manufacturer support (certain firmware works with some DRM/services, next rev fixes one but breaks another)
And even those are built on old hardware designs because there's been no significant advancement in set-top SoC performance for over 5 years. There are only a handful of set-top SoC makers (MediaTek, Amlogic, Rockchip, etc) and while they do occasionally introduce new chips, they mostly only update the video decoding block to support newer codec levels or DRM revisions while keeping the same ancient ARM CPU/GPU cores (or different cores with the same class of 2015-2018 performance).
A good example is the Ugoos AM6B Plus box someone in this thread mentioned as an option for certain use cases. It's been verified to decode DV7 with FEL BUT only works well with local files, not streaming services. And the Amlogic 922x SoC in that box is 5+ year-old tech (I have the same chip in an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k Max (2nd gen)). The hardware performance of these boxes has been essentially frozen in time due to a 'perfect storm' of factors:
* Most consumers want the cheapest box they can get which plays the main streaming platforms (NetFlix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, etc). As long as they get a picture of minimally acceptable quality, they don't know or care if the hardware/firmware/drivers properly support the better Dolbyvision levels or adds the enhancement layer or supports ICtCp color space, 12-bit tunneling through RGB or if it handles Source-Based Tone Mapping (SBTM) correctly. They also don't care about playing locally hosted files smoothly or horrendous latency in the Wifi/Ethernet driver stack that nerfs local game streaming.
* DRM is a shit show. The big Hollywood studios require streaming platforms to use specific encryption. So the streaming platform apps will only playback streams on SoCs which have been officially certified (or they nerf the stream to 720p). The certification process is onerous, costly and time-consuming for SoC makers.
* SoC makers, having run the certification gauntlet a couple times now, would like to do it again, approximately... never. On top of that mess, developing and maintaining firmware for their decoding block which properly supports the constantly evolving landscape of divergent codec levels, enhancement layers, color spaces, tone mapping, etc is hard, expensive and requires deep expertise across multiple domains. They just want to sell trays of cheap SoCs and see all the rest as a bottomless money pit eating their slim margins.
NVidia did all this with the Shield and it's grandfathered in on the DRM and they've done a decent job supporting some more recent codecs, levels and layers where they can. But the Tegra X1 platform is 10+ years old now - yet it's still slightly more performant than any other DRM-certified SoC to this day, which just shows what a mess this is.
Which is insanely frustrating if you understand technology platforms, care about actually seeing the full quality modern tech can deliver and would like to do so on a non-ancient hardware platform capable of other trivial things like locally streaming files with actual throughput >100mbps or streaming games with non-glacial latency. But that's just table stakes because the things which could be done with more modern hardware are super-interesting, like AI-based upscaling, frame gen, removing compression artifacts, reformatting content, on-device gaming, etc.
But using standard small form-factor PC/GPU hardware is a non-starter because of DRM certification. So... it would be great if NVidia would make a new Shield based on the new Tegra. But that's a huge new effort and, sadly, NVidia would crazy to divert resources or wafers from the AI-bubble cash printer to anything else - so I highly doubt it's going to happen.
honestly, shield tv changed how i interact with my tv and my opinion about Android TV (even though its market sucks)
It is how Android should be across all devices.
It's ironic that Nvidia before becoming a behemoth had the money for this kind of device.
They have been a public company for over 20 years.
Look at their valuation for those 20 years compared to today. What was their valuation 10 years ago?
Oh, I'm familiar with the valuation.
They were able to build this device and provide a Android TV certified 4K device that didn't need to have planned obsoleteness.
Yes. And it's ironic that they can do this ten years ago but can't be bothered to make a new one today. I guess the old one still works well enough and people buy it though which the article states.
Feels like a reverse Bell Labs approach. They find their cash cow and only invest in their cash cow rather than research new product areas and fields.
Its not ironic, its perfect business sense. 10 years ago they gave a shit about gamers and streamers as they were their main market. Now its all about AI server hardware, and they are fighting off international mega clients who all want to secure their chip output for years to come.
Why would Nvidia give 2 hoots about a living room streaming box now?
Streaming games as well.
They do seem to keep building devices for individual use, if not for home, like their new workstation at home for computers.
Because having all your eggs in one basket (GPUs), especially when that basket is artificially huge and likely to crumble, (AI Bubble), is a TERRIBLE idea?
Corporations dont think like that.
They look at market segment 1 (gamers) and see millions, possibly hundreds of millions.
They look at market segment 2 (ai) and they see hundreds of billions, possibly trillions.
Its a public company with shareholders and a board of directors to appease, the decision is an easy one.
> rather than research new product areas and field
Google “Gsync Pulsar”.
This is just being released now, which probably means its been in the R&D pipeline for the last few years. I would wager this is last gamer feature tech that Nvidia develops for quiter a while.
Maybe it's working fine enough for their uses?
I think they had done a minor hardware refresh, at the time it came out it was pretty powerful compared to the underpowered alternatives, plus the promise of pure Android TV on it.
I mean the main reason it exists is because. Nvidia spent a bunch of money designing and fabbing the Tegra for automotive use and nobody bought it so the project was desperate to find a customer rather than out of the goodness of their hearts. That's also why they sold it to Nintendo at a bargain basement price for the Switch.
I strongly suspect the reality is that they had to give Nintendo so much money back due to the complete failure of the bootloader security that they still produce the Shield as Jensen still demands they claw their way back to break even.