2020-10-11, 14:19
(2020-10-11, 03:03)MrCrispy Wrote: From what I've read the Shield is a bit of an outlier and the reason its so popular is its pretty much the only streaming device thats a) fast and b) supports lossless audio. This leads to it being a one box solution for everyone. But in fact its not the best when it comes to color space, refresh rate, picture quality etc compared to much cheaper hardware.
The colour space issue is an ongoing one I believe - but should be fixable (it's firmware not hardware AIUI).
Refresh rate support is good within Kodi - but in common with pretty much every other Android device (including Fire TVs) the refresh rate switching for DRM apps like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. requires the apps to be written with support for it, and most aren't (unlike Kodi which is)
The same is also true of the Apple TV 4K - but more app authors seem to have got on board with using the Apple refresh rate switching solution than have done the same on Android for some reason.
There is currently no fully 'automatic' refresh-rate switching DRM-playing solution AIUI - Apple's tvOS, Amazon's Fire OS, Google's Android and Android TV OSs all require apps to include support (Netflix don't have this support on their Android/Android TV and Fire OS apps, but do on their Apple tvOS app for instance). The nVidia Shield TV is one of the few players with a firmware 'work around' that will try to analyse the frame rate of the video when it is playing if manually triggered.
The Google Chromecast with Google TV appears to ignore the refresh rate API that the Shield TV supports - so is stuck at a single, fixed system-wide refresh rate.
Roku (not relevant for Kodi) DID have fully automatic refresh rate switching on some players with DRM solution - but they (or Netflix) disabled this with Netflix because the autoplay trailers kept triggering display re-syncs if it was enabled. Really annoying as the Roku was a 'do everything' solution for a while for DRM sources (and could be used alongside a great Kodi solution that didn't have DRM support)
Quote:The speed is due to Tegra K1, Nvidia intended it as a gaming device and sell people more gpu's on pc, that never really worked out.
b) is because Nvidia tweaked firmware to enable hd audio passthru and enable it in Android. But almost no other Android box does this even if the hw is perfectly capable. Hence CoreElec etc is recommended for those.
Just a note - the nVidia Shield TV doesn't use the old Tegra K1 (I think that was used by the much older Shield portable games console). The first gen nVidia Shield TVs (and the 1.5 gen refreshed models) use the Tegra X1, the 2019 update switched to the X1+. That's a MUCH faster chip than the K1 I believe - with a much better performing GPU.
