> Nvidia released the first Shield Android TV in 2015
> it took about 18 months to [create] an entirely new security stack [...] Android updates aren’t actually that much work compared to DRM security, and some of its partners weren’t that keen on re-certifying older products.
> In February 2025, Nvidia released Shield Patch 9.2 [...] That was the Tegra X1 [security] bug finally being laid to rest on the 2015 and 2017 Shield boxes.
This is a real engineering marvel. Everybody else would have just given up entirely long time ago. DRM bugs are in most case practically unrecoverable for products that shipped already (and physically in the hands of the adversary). The incentive to tell to consumers "Ditch that product you bought from us 2 years ago, and buy the more recent hardware revision or successor" is extremely strong.
This really feels like a platform that is maintained with pride and love by the nvidia engineering teams (regardless of one's opinion about DRM per se).
The only customers who care about DRM are the suppliers; not the users. Force the user to not be able to play DRM content, and they'll end up pirating.
Furthermore, I never demanded a new Android TV version. All I wanted was security fixes, not Google's new shitty launcher. I'd never have bought the product if it contained the current launcher.
They did this with the switch 1 too they were just less well remembered because that subsequently got re-hacked. They lost the ARM trust zone keys and rebuilt the entire DRM stack on the HDCP keys which had been provisioned but they were not using.
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.
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.
> Qualcomm straight up refuses to support chips through this many Android releases.
That's not entirely accurate. They do provide chips with extended support, such as the QCM6490 in the Fairphone 5. These are not popular because most of the market demands high performance, and companies profit from churning out products every year, but solutions exist for consumers who value stability and reliability over chasing trends and specs.
I think it's more a combination of vertical integration and Nvidia upper management actually wanting to provide support for so long. Apple, Google, and Samsung all make smartphones with their own chips, and yet none of them support running the newest OS on 10+ year old devices.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
From what I've seen in forums where people asked this, the answer is: nothing.
I only have two devices providing material to my media system: a Shield Pro and a Blu-Ray player. The Shield is the critical element, used daily for streaming and playing local media from a USB-connected SSD.
I hope Nvidia revises the Shield with up-to-date hardware and maintains its flexible nature. It's a pretty cool product. The biggest shortcomings I've encountered are the fault of moronic media companies. Great example: Spectrum (the cable company). These dolts have an Android application with which subscribers can watch content. But it doesn't run on Android TVs. It's called "Spectrum TV." It's so gallingly stupid that I hate rewarding them with money every month.
Oh, and I love how they addressed the goddamned Netflix button. If you so much as LOOK at the remote, Netflix launches in the middle of whatever you're watching. I actually removed the button from the remote entirely.
I've been using the Thomson Google TV Streaming Stick. It's cheap (~40 euros) and it works surprisingly well for what it is. It's sold in Europe, but I think you can find the same product in the US at Walmart, rebranded as Onn+ Streaming Device.
It's not as powerful as an Nvidia Shield, of course, but at least is not a random product from Temu riddled with spyware.
I have bought three for all my relatives since 2015, and finally bought one for myself. They are still in stock and sold by local brick and mortar retailers as well as online!
I use the n100 for jellyfin, and shield for streaming and controller with jellyfin client.
The built-in OS on my LG is honestly good enough for me. There's a jellyfin client in the LG app store that works well enough (it's just a wrapper for a browser client as I understand it). But I only use my TV to watch shows/movies, not sure about other usecases.
I'm not even sure which one I have, it's old but it's great. Use it for streaming (smarttube, some apps) and moonlight/sunshine. It does 4k with a ps5 controller so well. Love it. I think it was like a 100 bucks 8 years ago? I use my desktop 5090 and basically stopped using ps5 for couch gaming because it looks so much better. Great value!
Also, not that this is better probably (it is Google and Nvidia after all), but it means my Samsung TV is not connected to the internet, so I don't have to wait 10 seconds for the menu to come up because it is busy loading and injecting ads.
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.
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.
If I KNEW companies would do things like this, I'd be more likely to buy their product. But on the other hand I don't know who to trust because plenty say such things because it is easy to say then ... and then they just quit.
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.
This a company which routinely provides driver updates to their GPUs for 10+ years. I'm guessing that puts them in a different mindset from the get-go, to your typically smartphone vendor.
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.
My 2017 model probably short circuited during a lightning strike, because it stopped working after a storm. My friend offered to sell me his 2019 but I thought there'd be new hardware. I should have bought it.
I love the Shield, compared to even the Chromecast at the time, we noticed a huge difference in colour on the TV. If NVIDIA ever produce a refresh, they'll have my money.
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.
They updated it recently to fix the stuttering in the Disney app, and that issue had been there for a year or so. And they did that probably because Disney paid them.
something else that is outstanding about this device is the support. a couple of months ago my 2017 edition kept restarting occasionally while watching a movie so i got in touch with nvidia support, after a bit of back n forth they agreed to send me a brand new power adapter for free which arrived promptly and completely fixed the problem
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.
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.
Or alternatively: Apple could finally add support for bitstreaming to the Apple TV.
I'm kind of envious of how smooth and slick the ATV's UI is compared to the clunky UI on the ShieldTV, but I can't switch due to lack of bitstreaming support.
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.
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.
zimmerfrei|29 days ago
> it took about 18 months to [create] an entirely new security stack [...] Android updates aren’t actually that much work compared to DRM security, and some of its partners weren’t that keen on re-certifying older products.
> In February 2025, Nvidia released Shield Patch 9.2 [...] That was the Tegra X1 [security] bug finally being laid to rest on the 2015 and 2017 Shield boxes.
This is a real engineering marvel. Everybody else would have just given up entirely long time ago. DRM bugs are in most case practically unrecoverable for products that shipped already (and physically in the hands of the adversary). The incentive to tell to consumers "Ditch that product you bought from us 2 years ago, and buy the more recent hardware revision or successor" is extremely strong.
This really feels like a platform that is maintained with pride and love by the nvidia engineering teams (regardless of one's opinion about DRM per se).
altano|28 days ago
Pride and love, lol…
Fnoord|28 days ago
Furthermore, I never demanded a new Android TV version. All I wanted was security fixes, not Google's new shitty launcher. I'd never have bought the product if it contained the current launcher.
Waterluvian|28 days ago
int0x29|28 days ago
functionmouse|28 days ago
wronglebowski|29 days ago
jeroenhd|29 days ago
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.
magicalist|29 days ago
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.
raw_anon_1111|29 days ago
I (well my mom) had a supported with security updates version of Windows 7 on my 2007 Mac Mini (not a typo) until 2023.
imiric|28 days ago
That's not entirely accurate. They do provide chips with extended support, such as the QCM6490 in the Fairphone 5. These are not popular because most of the market demands high performance, and companies profit from churning out products every year, but solutions exist for consumers who value stability and reliability over chasing trends and specs.
IshKebab|29 days ago
ndiddy|28 days ago
Fnoord|28 days ago
pjmlp|29 days ago
buu709|29 days ago
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.
pdntspa|29 days ago
Loughla|29 days ago
But overall, for running it for like 9 years with a cost of less than $200 and essentially zero maintenance, the shield is awesome.
j45|29 days ago
DecoPerson|29 days ago
Blackthorn|29 days ago
boricj|29 days ago
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.
joe_mamba|29 days ago
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.
magicalhippo|29 days ago
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.
VerifiedReports|29 days ago
I only have two devices providing material to my media system: a Shield Pro and a Blu-Ray player. The Shield is the critical element, used daily for streaming and playing local media from a USB-connected SSD.
I hope Nvidia revises the Shield with up-to-date hardware and maintains its flexible nature. It's a pretty cool product. The biggest shortcomings I've encountered are the fault of moronic media companies. Great example: Spectrum (the cable company). These dolts have an Android application with which subscribers can watch content. But it doesn't run on Android TVs. It's called "Spectrum TV." It's so gallingly stupid that I hate rewarding them with money every month.
Oh, and I love how they addressed the goddamned Netflix button. If you so much as LOOK at the remote, Netflix launches in the middle of whatever you're watching. I actually removed the button from the remote entirely.
QuiEgo|29 days ago
reddalo|29 days ago
It's not as powerful as an Nvidia Shield, of course, but at least is not a random product from Temu riddled with spyware.
neumann|28 days ago
I use the n100 for jellyfin, and shield for streaming and controller with jellyfin client.
reppap|28 days ago
mavamaarten|29 days ago
sgloutnikov|29 days ago
This was the guide back then, possibly still works. [0]
[0] https://florisse.nl/shield-downgrade/
Novosell|28 days ago
flixing|28 days ago
bergheim|28 days ago
Also, not that this is better probably (it is Google and Nvidia after all), but it means my Samsung TV is not connected to the internet, so I don't have to wait 10 seconds for the menu to come up because it is busy loading and injecting ads.
beastman82|29 days ago
akersten|29 days ago
cf100clunk|29 days ago
qmr|29 days ago
ianburrell|29 days ago
duxup|28 days ago
It's part of the reason I like Apple devices.
stuaxo|29 days ago
emsixteen|28 days ago
badsectoracula|29 days ago
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.
swiftcoder|28 days ago
drnick1|29 days ago
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.
aaravchen|29 days ago
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.
mschild|28 days ago
Firefox supports Ublock origin on Android or am I missing something here?
nevi-me|29 days ago
I love the Shield, compared to even the Chromecast at the time, we noticed a huge difference in colour on the TV. If NVIDIA ever produce a refresh, they'll have my money.
hgomersall|29 days ago
cf100clunk|29 days ago
raggi|29 days ago
If they wanted to really knock it out the park, the next step would be a steamos port with DRM support.
drnick1|29 days ago
There are other ways to source videos than paying a monthly fee forever for something that you will never own.
Mindwipe|29 days ago
(I think it should happen but that's not the same as that it will.)
j45|29 days ago
JoshGlazebrook|28 days ago
TuringNYC|29 days ago
aaravchen|29 days ago
JoeBOFH|29 days ago
j45|29 days ago
The reality though, is that there's likely bigger fish being chased.
xchip|28 days ago
It's a corporation, they don't work for free.
sp3n|28 days ago
pier25|29 days ago
ekianjo|28 days ago
g051051|29 days ago
joshstrange|29 days ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|29 days ago
j45|29 days ago
junon|29 days ago
dilfred|29 days ago
zdw|29 days ago
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.
Forgeties79|29 days ago
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.
add-sub-mul-div|29 days ago
nickthegreek|29 days ago
DustinBrett|29 days ago
tempest_|29 days ago
Aaargh20318|28 days ago
I'm kind of envious of how smooth and slick the ATV's UI is compared to the clunky UI on the ShieldTV, but I can't switch due to lack of bitstreaming support.
sergiotapia|29 days ago
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.
mrandish|29 days ago
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.
titaniumrain|29 days ago
j45|29 days ago
Midar|29 days ago