[Dark_Slayer]

X1 was better then anything out there when it came out

We were all just spoiled by the rapid pace ARM had advanced from 2007 - 2015 that the slowdown in advancement these past couple years has caught us offguard. As a Kodi/spmc living room appliance ... there isn't anything that a Maxwell GPU can't deliver. Like everyone has mentioned, the software needed to catch up with the hardware. Android can still grow the features it was missing. Fortunately for Nvidia that work doesn't really get stolen, copied, etc as their core business is hardware. Better software sells more hardware. In the GPU market I left red for green after the X1050 and bring fed up with catalyst drivers. Next build the Nvidia 8800GT had me hooked. Didn't upgrade for a while. Such a great difference in terms of driver updates/support. Clearly they (back then as only a GPU company) continued to improve software to sell hardware as opposed to just pushing out more and more hardware without ever really supporting the software to get the most from it

[BORIStheBLADE]

Sounds like you just don't care to hear anyone's opinion that might differ from yours..

Wait......did you just take my differing opinion to say that I don't want to hear differing opinions? So if I'm not agreeing with you, then I'm not listening?

You can twist it up all you want.

It all boils down to while you are right about new features and needing hardware to push it people still want to see a hardware update. We can talk till we are blue in the face about why a remote might be worth $50.00 or how the experience is good enough and doesn't need any more performance. But people are gonna look at it as old hardware. That's just what the market has become with Android hardware so they have it embedded in their mind even if Nvidia is God with support. Everyone already wants to buy the cheapest Android box and expect it to do what the Shield does..

To think this all started with me saying

Man I'm really surprised Nvidia is literally selling the same hardware for Shield 2. Kind of a let down, but its still a pretty darn good piece of hardware..

[timstephens24]

Still a good piece of hardware but after a year and a half, if you put out the same thing at least make it cheaper.

[tredman]

Still a good piece of hardware but after a year and a half, if you put out the same thing at least make it cheaper.

They did, remote is now included. Used to be £40 extra here.

[rodalpho]

It's been asked many times now, but I'll ask again. Why is it a let down? What do you think new hardware would bring to the table that can't already be done with the current hardware?

It doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot for media player purposes, but a new pascal Tegra would use less power and clock almost twice as high, leading to dramatically improved 3D gaming performance. Or it could be clocked at the same speed to offer the same performance with silent passive cooling.

I would also like to see an IR blaster integrated into the housing of the device, rather than the remote.

And finally as many people have pointed out, selling essentially identical hardware two years later without dropping the price is a real bummer. And no, including the remote doesn't count as dropping the price, it's just a more attractive product at the same price. I would be much more interested in a $150 ShieldTV with the remote but no gamepad. Even at $150 it would still be a premium product, priced the same as the AppleTV and a full 50% higher than the FireTV.

[couto27]

Wake me up for New Nvidia Shield Hardware for Blu-ray 8K and we need to stream 1000Mbps files.

You can find some high (and ridiculously high) bitrate video clips in this thread - Doom9 Forum: Evaluation of HEVC decoders

Check posts #286 for a 280Mbps L5.2 AVC clip, #690 for 100/200/300Mbps HEVC clips, #964 for 127Mbps HEVC main10 clip, #981 for a 1000Mbps HEVC main10 clip. All of them are 4K 50fps.

Kodi on SATV struggles only with the 1000Mbps clip. Interestingly, Kodi didn't even open this clip from SATV's internal flash, but it opened the clip from an external USB 3.0 SSD. The native Android video player cannot open anything above 100Mbps. I also couldn't get any of the videos to play from my NAS that is on a gigabit network. That was strange.

ps: Sorry about the text size, some of you might miss it

Heres true story:
I bought the Linksys EA9500 and that expensive thing has the latest and fastest hardware networking for consumer, it might take a few years to all my gadgets support MU-MIMO (up to 8 devices ) until there, im not taking advantage of its price/performance, except im using their Seamless Roaming technology using the other expensive Linksys RE7000 extender.

The New Shield would justify to have their Hardware upgraded only if they implement Dolby Vision.

[timstephens24]

Still a good piece of hardware but after a year and a half, if you put out the same thing at least make it cheaper.

They did, remote is now included. Used to be £40 extra here.

Adding in something I don't want doesn't count lol.

[PantsOnFire]

My personal opinion.. the remote should always have been included with the shield in the first place so I don't really agree that this is better value this time around.

I also think, even though X1 has no superior, the unit would ideally be just a touch cheaper than it is.

--the guy makes very valid point when saying people are already keen to find the cheapest android box to get their kodi running.

Other possible hardware improvements? Well... Ok maybe we can't up the cpu, but why ditch the sd slot? Things like that are useful. And how about a bit more storage? 16gb isn't reaaalllly a whole lot.

And please don't say 'just buy the 500 then' because thats a different price point.

Question, Always-on, very cool that it can control the home.. I wldnt have much use for it, I tend to live in a more traditional environment... But is this to say... Tv must be on for Google voice response to be heard? (through tv speaker).

Just thoughts,,,,

Other thoughts...
'Who do u think u are?' --SATV isnot *just* a kodi box. Must keep in mind we are in the kodisphere here, it's not mainly marketed as a kodi box so really, some of our opinions don't really reflect theirs.

Ps- talk of 1000mbps video files makes me giddy, :-) jk

[wrxtasy]

What I find interesting is that here with the Shield we have HDR capable online streaming Apps from Netflix and now Amazon. In fact there has been headlines made about adding HDR functionality.

So I ask where is DolbyVison support on the Shield ?

The Shield certainly should have a more that capable SoC to support DolbyVision streaming and Android Nougat itself has also added DolbyVison support. You only need HDMI 1.4 to carry the DV dynamic metadata.

Is there going to be a mid year Shield Firmware update to add such DV functionality ?
Netflix already has such DV streaming capabilities on compatible DV TV's.

[FestivusOz]

For the layman, what does Android 7 (under the hood of new site?) do for live TV? I googled it and read an article posted august 2016. Some things about time shifting live video which wasn't possible before... I don't know much else.
I've seen quite a few videos of policy using hd homerun in conjunction with shield. Lon Seidman has a lot of coverage, and its always looked quite complete, although still a bit involved to get set up imho. (Homerun boxes ain't cheap).

So what about this new shield could be beneficial in this area? Anyone clued up?

Another option is getting an Amlogic s905 box and install Libreelec with a USB TV tuner attached. Cost me AUD$50 (~USD$33) for a networked single tuner.

Or a oDroid C2? that WRXtasy I Bruce is the developer for.

As the hardware is not changing I wonder if NVIDIA will look at 3D MVC? Possibly the Achilles heel of the shield

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3010

[herhelman]

I was thinking about change the receiver, so, change will come faster....
I have an Onkyo 636 receiver also in my HT room ( ready to be out of business to accommodate one more children) so i will test Shield on HT, now is hooked onto living room TV.
I will post tomorrow if passthrough works on 636

thanks for the advice !!
Hernán

Cool... You shouldn't have a problem with the Onkyo TX-NR636 AVR.

Hi, It´s me again...
Tested Kodi Kritpton and SPMC 16.1. HD audio passthrough works great except for ATMOS... just True HD on Onkyo 636
I tried a year ago with a Realtek 1195 player and receiver shows "trueHD" and when I pressed "display" button, displayed ATMOS, but now only "true HD"...
There´s something i need to adjust, some special version of Kodi or SPMC? Is it ONKYO fault?
thanks in advance!
Hernán

[touser]

Normally I would agree that the relaunch of basically the same hardware would be a disappointment but for once i'm glad they did. The software on the current hardware is still pretty rough around the edges, it's taken them this long to get it to a barely acceptable state. I was waiting for them to release new hardware, start with a whole fresh batch of bugs to be mostly fixed in a years time and to abandon the current hardware, rinse/repeat. At least that isn't happening!

[couto27]

What I find interesting is that here with the Shield we have HDR capable online streaming Apps from Netflix and now Amazon. In fact there has been headlines made about adding HDR functionality.

So I ask where is DolbyVison support on the Shield ?

The Shield certainly should have a more that capable SoC to support DolbyVision streaming and Android Nougat itself has also added DolbyVison support. You only need HDMI 1.4 to carry the DV dynamic metadata.

Is there going to be a mid year Shield Firmware update to add such DV functionality ?
Netflix already has such DV streaming capabilities on compatible DV TV's.

DV needs to be implemented in the Hardware and is licensed technology, when the Tegra X1/shield was develop Dolby vision was not even finalised.

dolby vision white paper

The Shield came out in May 2015
The first Hardware with DV came out at CES 2016 with LG OLED and Vizio TVs see rtings for DV hardware release date

The first content with DV was Vudu in November 2015
The first bluray players supporting DV will be the latest UHD Oppo 203 (december 2016) and the UHD from LG coming in March 2017
The cromecast Ultra support DV since november 2016

[Tinwarble]

It doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot for media player purposes, but a new pascal Tegra would use less power and clock almost twice as high, leading to dramatically improved 3D gaming performance. Or it could be clocked at the same speed to offer the same performance with silent passive cooling.

I would also like to see an IR blaster integrated into the housing of the device, rather than the remote.

And finally as many people have pointed out, selling essentially identical hardware two years later without dropping the price is a real bummer. And no, including the remote doesn't count as dropping the price, it's just a more attractive product at the same price. I would be much more interested in a $150 ShieldTV with the remote but no gamepad. Even at $150 it would still be a premium product, priced the same as the AppleTV and a full 50% higher than the FireTV.

A new Pascal Tegra wouldn't necessarily mean it would use less power, and since there's no successor to the X1 it's conjecture. Improved clock speed doesn't matter, nor does improved 3D gaming performance matter since there is nothing currently using the full performance of the X1 and any future gaming performance could probably be improved by utilizing Vulcan, which no game currently does. And I don't know what being passively cooled would do since the with the current Shield the fan is inaudible and no matter what SoC was used, cooler is always better.

And it's your opinion that adding the remote isn't a price drop, but the fact is that you are still getting more for the same price, whether it is added value for you are not is a personal preference. And lets go the other way, if Nvidia had decided to offer everything separately, do you really think the Shield alone would be $90? And how you would like it packaged doesn't matter, Nvidia isn't doing A la cart sales, they've packaged it in a manor that they feel will sell their device. Does the Apple TV, @$149, offer game streaming as a selling point? Does the FIreTV have the same features and performance or offer game streaming as a selling point? You talked about adding new hardware for better game performance which would contradicted not wanting a game controller.

You see, not everyone wants the Shield for the same things. Some people want to game on it, some just want a media player and some want both. Nvidia has packaged it so everyone can get what they want out of it.

EDIT: And we all wish that the new Shield would be what we want it to be, I wish that they just skipped over Pascal and went straight to Xavier/Volta and it came in at under $200. But there's wishing, then there's reality.

[couto27]

If you guys want to understand the technical stuff that goes on Dolby Vision read the first 2 or 3 pages of this topic in avsforum why sony & samsung aren't using dolby vision.

The see page 11 #post 301 where theres a link to the podcast in avforum.