Big news for those of you who have NVIDIA Shield TV – which, by the way, is the only Android TV box you should consider right now. The Android 8.0 Oreo update (which brings it up to the latest major version of Android) is available starting today.
This’ll bring along a major update to the user interface. You’ll get new sections along the left side of the screen, with your favorite apps (customizable, of course), play next (where what you’ve been watching and playing recently will appear) and channels (which is what apps are now called, sort of).
In addition, Amazon Prime Video will get a major refresh, Plex Media Service is improved, and a whole bunch more.
The NVIDIA Shield TV is a device with a what I guess is a small, but very dedicated fanbase. I’m always tempted to buy one to see what all the fuss is about.
I’ve got the first-gen version; it’s nice but I rarely use it because most of the same features are available on other devices we’ve already got hooked up without the need to switch HDMI inputs (DVR and Xbox One share an input).
One use I’ve found it *very* nice for is for in-home game streaming from a Windows PC, using Nvidia’s streaming feature built into their GPU drivers. It should be possible to use the Steam streaming app on it now too, will have to try it out!
You could do the same game streaming with Valve’s little Steam Link if they still make it, but for a little more outlay for the Shield Android TV you get all the extra services and the ability to actually run stuff like VLC or Plex etc if that floats your boat.
Yep, Steam streaming works great. It also makes for a nice and fast Plex server provided you have a NAS or USB3 external hard drive for file storage. I don’t use Plex anymore (we switched to Emby which suits our needs better) but when we had Plex on it, it worked beautifully.
It’s the only Google-associated device I still own, and I would almost give it up for a Roku 4 or Apple TV except those can’t even come close to the versatility and gaming support (I rarely play games on the PC anymore since most of what I like to play is available on the Shield).
Considering it has a full array of ports including gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0, I would love to see a Linux distro ported to it with full hardware support. I know it’s based on the same SoC as the Nvidia Jetson dev boards which do have Linux support, but for some reason no one has bothered porting to the Shield, and I’m not nearly smart enough to even attempt it. I think it would make for the most powerful ARM based desktop PC on the market by a wide margin, if it were allowed to be one.
I used to own a Shield Tablet until recently, and can say that they are very nice devices. If I remember correctly, the Shield TV is exactly the same chip, with more ports. The Tegra K1 runs circles around any other mobile processor out there, and the battery life was great!
I’m always surprised NVIDIA has not managed to get their chip on phones and tablets from other manufacturers.
The Tegra X1 that’s in the Shield Android TV is also in the Google Pixel C tablet, which runs pretty nice. But it’s not sold widely as I understand.
Two problems nvidia basically just sells the processor so the phone manufacturers have to get the rest somewhere else, and the power consumption is somewhat to high for a pure mobile device unless you cut performance. So basically perfect for set top boxes and Nintendo, but not really perfect for phones and tablets.
As for Set top boxes, most set top box producers try to get away with as cheap as possible and as little support as possible, so the pricing of the Tegra is not really ideal and NVidia already sells the perfect box with the perfect support (The Shield is about in its fourth year and still has excellent support and still is the fastest and best Android TV box out there)
Maybe not diving heads on with suing Samsung / Qualcomm would have allowed them for better adoption rates.
Aside from mobile, in automotive they sell more Tegras anyway..
I don’t know why they’ve stopped selling it (well, I think they have). I had one for Android app testing and it was bloomin’ marvellous. Super speedy. Render damn near anything I through at it. Stock Android. Always up-to-date. Even had Vulkan support eons ago.
My mum has it now. She won’t give it back!
Maybe it’s too expensive for what it does? If you *DON’T* give a damn about gaming, why waste your money on this thing?
Buy a cheap chinese-made android box instead. There’s not a real difference between these things when it comes to actually watching tv.
Always up-to-date? Don’t make me laugh. You’re talking about a playback device for freaking TV’s moron. What’s on such a device that’s needs to be updated that often?
Do you work for Best Buy or some other retailer that sells overpriced NVIDIA rubbish?
I use it as both my Plex server and client. It’s easily the best Plex option out there.
Apparently Google changed the Android TV ui from an app centric ui to a content centric UI. Amazon did that about a year ago and made the Fire TV basically unusable that way. I hope google does better. But apparently NVidia held the update back because the original UI from google was severely broken because almost not a single app supported the new content centric approach and also they had problems to fit their gaming related ui workflow into it.
But lets see how the update turns out. I trust NVidia more than google not to break things, so they might have fixed what google basically broke and flushed down the toilet just for change sake.
While these things look gorgeous, I’ve been through so many Android devices for use as TV boxes, and none of them ever work right for everything.
I gave up on Android for use as a TV box and got one of these. (link below)
Haven’t looked back since. Works great for everything I throw at it.
http://www.dx.com/p/guleek-gpc-intel-z8300-win10-smart-super-pc-2gb…
Granted, I doubt it could decode 4k
Edited 2018-05-25 07:46 UTC
I don’t see why not, Intel’s Cherry Trail graphics engine can do up to 4Kp30 as far as I know. You should give it a whirl with the 2D 4K versions of this video:
http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/download.html
What’s on TV that’s actually worth buying a 4k set for?
Answer:Nothing.