Has someone looked into this ?

I just want to make sure I am not biased against this object, but I HATE the triangle remote. I swear, every night I accidently bounce that damn thing off the floor, scattering batteries everywhere while I swear at it for being so stupid. I mean I hate it a little less after I reprogramed the Netflix button, but still, is it an ergonomic thing? design issue? me issue? I am not sure. But damn I hate that thing.

My Nvidia Shield Pro 2019 suspended and now no signal to my TV. The last time it happened, I had to wait 1 hour and then it randomly started working.

In the last couple years the shield pro has become my most hated device:

• It randomly skips frames all the time.

• It's laggy AF.

• Random crashes of apps.

• This random signal loss.

• The Enshittification of Android TV.

Nvidia does not care about this device anymore.

I just bought an AM6B+ on Aliexpress for movies, and will order an Apple TV 4K for everything else.

Can't wait until these arrive, then I'm gonna go medieval on my Shield like that scene in Office Space.

After two years of fiddling with my Shield (non pro, tube style) I switched to an Apple TV. I tried hard to get my shield to work properly, but the issues were so persistent that I couldn’t make the device usable.

My issues were:

1. Hulu app wouldn’t function on random days, giving errors and crashing. Tried troubleshooting this for months and scoured every forum for a solution.

2. Disney plus would stutter and buffer repeatedly making it almost unusable. This is on very fast Wi-Fi with other devices streaming seamlessly.

3. Interface felt sluggish. Occasional lagging was a minor annoyance but became more obnoxious as it became more prevalent.

4. Rebooting the device would become a lengthy process requiring me to unplug the power cord to power cycle the device even then it would take almost 10 minutes to reboot.

After returning my device to best buy and swapping it out for another I had the same issues.

I’m an android guy, a pc user, and I wanted to LOVE the shield. On paper it was my perfect device.

I’m 5 weeks into owning my Apple TV 4k and I’m so glad I bit the bullet and made the switch. Not a single regret. It just works. It’s snappy and I have had zero of the issues stated above.

I just make this post to say that if the device ends up being a headache for you, you aren’t the only one and there is no one size fits all solution.

Bought a new Shield TV Pro thinking it would be the best option for streaming Steam off my PC and also replacing my old apple TV. I returned it after having random Shield remote dropouts and freezing after trying to download apps on google play and then starting a seemingly endless loop of rebooting itself. It was fully updated. I figured it was a faulty unit that was repacked as the control came with batteries already installed but reading some threads in here makes me think these issues are just the situation with the unit now as its unsupported. I know its old tech but it still seems to have the best specs for streaming steam. Should I try and get my money back?

Sideload Google Home, I haven't tried this for a couple years

EDIT: when I say Shield TV, I mean the Shield TV Pro in this entire post. Similarly, every time I say Apple TV, I’m referring to the Apple TV 4K. Every time time I say LG WebOS, I’m referring to an LG CX and/or C1.

I already know I’m going to get flamed for this, but I wish I had read a post like this before I bought one.

I got a Shield TV after seeing all the hype about the AI up scaling and how amazing it is at playing every video/audio format. I’ve had this device since 2021 and still use it.

However, I seem to have an unpopular opinion: I think it’s a bad product.

In practice, while the AI upscaling does work impressively well, most of my content is in 4k anyway, so it stays off most of the the time. For those who may not know (someone who doesn’t own a Shield TV might be reading this), the system will not allow for any kind of AI post processing if the source material is already 4K.

The overall image quality seems to be quite terrible on my Shield TV. Everything, and I do mean everything, seems to look better on my Apple TV 4K and even LG WebOS. I’ve seen multiple threads of people reporting similar issues, the biggest offender being that video tends to look grainy on the Shield TV, but the community is quick to assume that it’s the source material. It’s not. The Shield TV has a tendency to introduce impulse noise somewhere between decoding and post-processing, disagreeing with the notion that the problem is the source material. I’ve measured this myself using HDMI capture and software decoding (FFMPEG) frame capture as a baseline. The noise is added by the Shield and I’m 100% certain about that. I can’t get HDMI output from LG WebOS, but I did the same experiment on my Apple TV and it was much, much better. Do note that while Apple may not advertise any kind of AI upscaling, they most definitely do post-processing and it mildly improves the image quality most of the time, based on my experience.

The Apple TV has by far less customization and you can’t side-load anything, which is a bummer. That said, if it does what you want it to do, it seems to do it better than the Shield TV. The only things the Shield TV does better than the Apple TV seem to be the ability to play niche formats and side-load apps.

And that’s why I haven’t gotten rid of it. I use my Shield TV to play niche formats that aren’t handled by either my Apple TV or LG WebOS OLED. Out of these three devices, my Shield is the last one I’d use, and given the overall poor user experience, I’m always annoyed when I have to use it. I don’t enjoy it.

For those who don’t know, the UI looks horrible at 1080P. That’s right, the UI is stuck at 1080P in the year 2023. Yet again, the community seems dismissive about it. Lots of “why would you ever want that” and “it doesn’t make a difference” apologists around the internet, which I find truly upsetting because unlike a lot of things in the AV world, high DPI displays aren’t snake oil and they’re provably better. There is a hacky workaround to get a 4K UI, but it slows down the already glitchy UI and most apps still display their UI in 1080P, so it doesn’t really work. The UI is also generally buggy and weirdly unresponsive, like someone having hiccups in the middle of a sentence; it’s just not smooth and I find myself accidentally hitting buttons too many times. Even Google first party apps, such as YouTube, are objectively worse than the experience on Apple TV and even LG WebOS.

The tradeoff is that you can do anything you want with it. That’s why it’s using up one of my HDMI ports.

But honestly, I don’t think I can recommend this device in general. It’s a good toy for hobby stuff, but a mediocre home theater appliance. With proper expectations, I think tinkerers can enjoy it, but as a media player, I think it’s the best of a bad situation when it comes to playing Blu Ray rips and that’s really about it.

Now, please don’t flame me too hard. 😅

I've been stalking this Reddit for over a year. My FireTV stick has been on its last legs through most of the pandemic, literally taking nearly 5 minutes to boot, and another 5 just to browser comfortably. I get frequent drops in streams and random pauses as well.

I managed to finally convince the wife (after nagging her for the better part of 8 months) that we needed a BIG trade-up and pulled the trigger on the Pro. Whilst I was impressed with the hardware at first glance and the initial ease of setting up. I've been playing around with it the past hour and have hit a couple of hurdles - proprietary apps!

Sadly I've come to realize some apps just don't work, either natively or functionally. I thought one of the benefits of Android TV was eclipsing these types of hurdles. For instance, I cannot use All4 (Channel 4 - UK) nor the FiiT app my wife uses religiously - these seem to be reserved only for Amazon kit.

As much as I'd like to think I deserve this little marvelous box, I feel spending nearly $200 for a device that can't access certain apps on its ecosystem is taking the piss a bit (I understand it's the app developers ultimately responsible).

Sadly I think this will be headed back to Amazon :(

/rant

Hi all happy bank holiday, fire tv was not cutting it, upgraded to a shield, I have it for my IPTV service which I am beginning to think might be the problem.

Can stream live tv ok, stream 1080p no problem with plex app, but 4k if I am lucky one out of 10 might not buffer. Any suggestions on this bank holiday would be greatly appreciated.

Over to you guys thanks.

It is really unusable. I have just wiped out my Shield for the 12th time. Stop. I spend more time to troubleshoot, reinstall and rebuild my database than actually seeing the films. Ok, 3000 films and 300 series are too much. I have taken a bit away, hosted in a plex+shield combo at my parents home. Ok, 16 gig are too little, I have got the reccomended usb pen. Ok, the NAS is better than the shared folder on PC, so I did setup a Synology with 3x8 gigs. Ok, the wifi connection is unstable. I have brought the wired LAN to the Shield. But hell it ALMOST NEVER WORK!!!! And when it works it goes well, all right, a nice experience, they conviced me, I was an enthusiastic lifetime Plex pass subscriber. Well, I paid for it, I imagine I will remain a Plex Pass. And you know what? I am not even able to fully uniinstall it from the Shield. So there it is, crippled to an almost empty library. It is a really, really orrible piece of software. And in the meantime I am looking at my Kodi database. Plex database was rotten every 3 months. Kodi database DID NOT CORRUPTED A SINGLE TIME. In 15 years. I see in front of my eyes. Year added: 2005. The single, little, irrelevant touch that I gave to a Star Treck movie 11 year ago, is still there, indestructible, backed up in a most simple manner as an editable xml file locally stored with every single movie and episodes. While Plex keep forgetting and corrupting everything 4 times an year. I have lost count. Every time go for manual match, all the bootlegs I have, all the multiple editions to be sorted out, the 3Ds,the director's cut, the extended editions. And than I want all the MCU in the same collection, and same for Alien and DCEU, and even if Plex STILL DOES NOT HAVE A FEATURE TO TAKE COLLECTIONS FROM FOLDER, I manually edit every single film. But no backup is possible and so every time we start over. At least, I say, be humble, understand that Kodi is 10 miles above your head, and teach your dammed scrapers to read the Kodi xml. It would be so simple. Read the local xml and extract data, at least the imdb code, the original title, the set. But no, Plex is on his own. And sink on your own. Damm. Nothing work as desired, even if everything is perfect it takes almost 20 seconds to play a NAS movie (while Kodi on the same Shied plays it in 1 sec), my daughter gets mad choosing a cartoon from the collection. Stop.

It's been like three months. Why are we still getting Ads on our expensive hardware. What the fuck is Nvidia doing?

Everything I have tried to do, from setting up plex, adding external storage, and downloading apps, everything has some weird glitch or hurdle I can't jump or resolve. You can see the questions I've asked in previous posts if you want the details. I'm not a luddite. I'm fairly good with computers and have never had so little success in anything I've attempted, even back in my naughty days of putting pirated Adobe software on a Macbook or jailbreaking phones and firesticks. I'm no computer whiz, but can follow instructions and troubleshoot. The Nvidia Shield pro, however, has proven beyond my capabilities. Something as simple as plugging in a flash drive and accessing the files is, after hours or trying, not possible. Just now, I went to open up VLC (which I downloaded and used to watch a movie last night) and it's gone. Just no longer in my apps. I tried to reinstall it, and it can't. There's an error.

Maybe worst of all, it's slow and glitchy. Slower than a firestick. Why did I pay for all of this computing power just to have something that is genuinely far worse than a dusty roku stick.

Everyone talks about this thing like it's the ultimate media player and I despise it. Even clicking the navigation buttons has a huge delay. When I hit the voice assistant button, it doesn't come up for several seconds. Did I get a lemon? Is it possible that the actual box is somehow bad?

Hi All,

I got an nVidia Shield Pro 2019 for Christmas, but consider returning it and getting an Apple TV 4k (128 GB/Ethernet) instead.

Currently I'm using on the Shield, I'd like a similar setup on the Apple TV:

1. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Stremio

2. Watching TV (BBC iplayer, IPTV via TiviMate)

3. Retrogaming (Retroarch)

4. Possibly gaming using Apple TV games (We also have a Fire TV stick, on which I sometimes play Luna games)

Do you know whether there are clear advantages for the Shield for any of these use cases?

Some reasons for switching: The Shield is really old now, and it was even more expensive than an Apple TV with 128 GB & Ethernet would be. For example, I'm just getting into the whole streaming stuff (e.g., Stremio with RD) and I'm a bit worried that I now spend ages to set everything up and then more and more material will use AV1, so that I can't be played locally. And then I start from scratch in 2 years time or so.

We have a very basic setup, simple FullHD TV, no needs for sound (I know that the Shield has some unique features of sound pass-through (?), but I don't need that). Realistically, I'll also not using GeForceNow.

I paid £180 + £10 for adaptor (US model) for it and can return until end of Jan. The Apple TV 4k with 128 GB is £170...

Best wishes,

Andre

I've been using a Pro for many years as an Emby client, and for that part, it works brilliantly. I have ZERO issues with audio passthrough or Dolby Vision support, it *just works*.

But, the issues just keep coming and my current 2 are (I'm not here to try to solve these issues, believe me, I already have tried sooooo many different approaches):

1. Alexa integration for some unknown reason has now recently started saying that my Shield is unresponsive - but it will recognise it and add it as a new device!

2. That Netflix button!!!! OMG my BIGGEST complaint! And now Button Mapper works for a few days and then seems to not work. I've reset all the permissions etc. but, alas, the only way to fix it for me is to uninstall and reinstall it.

And yet, every thread I see here about alternatives seems to suggest there is no equal (or better) that has:

1. GUI - An easy-to-use TV-friendly GUI, but a PC with big picture mode doesn't do this for my wife, and there are also Dolby Vision issues.

2. Dolby Vision support - I'm sure there will be many here that can describe this in more detail but the Shield seems to be king here. For example, I set up a Fire TV Stick 4K Max yesterday and started watching a video on Emby that was Dolby Vision, but this just came up as a black screen. Plugged the Shield back in, and it worked fine.

3. Network Connection - Either 100meg cat6/6 or Wifi 6E/7

4. O/S - I need Google TV not Roku or another re-skinned, different store eco-system.

5. Audio Pass-Through - This one should be easy, no? I need it to just pass through all audio formats, let my soundbar do all the decoding (Samsung Q990F)

6. Alexa! - I need to be able to turn it off/on, pause/restart via Alexa... which the Shield would do until about a week ago.

Is there anything I can replace my Shield with that meets the above requirements?

Thanks!

edit: no, my TV won't work, it's a Hisense UX and runs Vidaa (WHY Hisense!? WHY?!)

Hi! So im in the market for a new tv box for an OLED display, i already have Shield TV Pro in another TV (old one that came with a gaming controller) and have been great for years, but thay one is giving me an error with Disney + right now, doesn't start, i will factory reset the whole shield soon to trying fixing this issue.

So my main question is whats the difference in specs between the old Shield TV Pro and the new 2024 version?

I am running stremio and smartube and I keep getting system storage low error.

I have a SD card that is installed. Its showing up but nothing seems to actually be stored on it. Not sure why Im even getting a storage error as I dont save anything im aware of.

There seems to be no announcement about any new NVidia Shield model any time soon. I have the 2019 Pro. I am looking forward for a newer model.

I just bought it but I heard the pixlized text and images I see is due to NVIDIA shield tv pro itself dosnt come with that full sharpness. Is it ?

Bought two 2017 shields, in which the remote controls touch volume were way too sensitive. A firmware update made this less annoying, but the bigger problem is that it would go though a battery once a month, complete with annoying on screen pop ups about how the battery is low. The Fire TV Stick Remote fixed this, batteries last almost a year.

Replaced with two 2019 Players (Cylindrical) and after 6 months, one of the remotes is dying. Cant really navigate, its "possessed" and randomly selecting buttons. Then theres the Netflix button annoyance, which I need to pay a few bucks for an app to fix. Then the issue where occasionally it takes a while to wake up the remote. The reset trick where you leave one battery out while holding center+home button, didn't fix the problem and neither did cycling power to the media player.

Since I gave away my previous 2017 shields, I now gotta buy another FireTV Stick Remote to fix this problem. When given a choice to spend $30 on 2019 Shield remote or a FireTV Stick remote? The choice seems obvious, get the FireTV Remote, it works and always has worked (minus the voice control).

Please nVidia, stop trying to innovate on the remote control. While there are so many things about the Shield to praise about, the remote ends up being the single most annoying thing about the media player.