[MastaHunta]

Hello Kodi Community!

I know I'm a newbie so I read the pinned "start here" and "hardware lists" but they didn't quite cover what I'm looking for.  I've had kodi and some old emulators running on an old laptop, but now that I'm moving into a new house I'm wanting to upgrade to a new device that will work in our living room on our good-ish tv. 

So I started a list of things I want my home-box to do:

1. Play the movies and TV I've amassed over the years
   • I've got an external drive with a little over 3 TB's of movies on it
     
   • I'm hoping it can register the movies on the external HDD as part of the library
     
2. Easily switch to Netflix or Hulu depending on if my wife wants to watch something on there
   
3. Run some of my emulators of my old games
   • All games I own physical copies, not interested in the philosophy or politics of emulators
     
   • Also nice would be to have a controller to play some of the games with
     
4. Not take up a lot of space and work with my tv
   • It's a 39" 1080p LCD TV, the best I can afford for a while
     
5. Stay under my budget (started with a max of around $500)
   

After quite a bit of looking, I started reading up on the NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, and I think it hits every one of my criteria, but $300 is quite a bit to shell out without knowing for sure.  If any of you have an NVIDIA Shield TV, will it do the things I'm wanting it to? Thanks in advance!

[BORIStheBLADE]

If you can afford it I don't think you'd regret it. The extra space for roms would go a long way.

[MastaHunta]

If you can afford it I don't think you'd regret it. The extra space for roms would go a long way.

So do you have any experience with the NVIDIA Shield TV?
Do you happen to know if Kodi works with it while an external HDD is connected?
Or do you know if it plays emulators well?

[Tinwarble]

For the Shield, the first place to start is here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=304226

Yes you can attach an external drive, and you can add your files from that drive to Kodi's library.

Yes it does work well with emulators.

That said, unless you are going to use the Shield as a Plex server you don't need to spend the extra money on a Pro.  Just get the 16GB model and a good USB 3.0 flash drive and adopt it.   You can pick up a 128GB drive for about $30 & that will give you more than enough storage.

[BORIStheBLADE]

If you can afford it I don't think you'd regret it. The extra space for roms would go a long way.

So do you have any experience with the NVIDIA Shield TV?
Do you happen to know if Kodi works with it while an external HDD is connected?
Or do you know if it plays emulators well? 

I love the Shield TV. I only play media over my network so I don't use usb for external HDD but I haven't heard of any issues. Right now I have messed around with emulators a little and it works well but it has some limits with newer console emulation. I haven't figured out what scenario I like for emulations, there are many options.

The reason why I say go for the Pro is using the internal storage leaves your USB vacant for other options down the road..

[Thebatfink]

I got mine at the weekend to upgrade my gen 2 FireTV. Very happy, fast and powerful (compared to FireTV). Running Kodi 18 nightlies no deinterlacing issues on live TV. All the usual Netflix and Amazon apps. Great little thing.