Having been an active user of Home Theater Personal Computers for many years (running Windows 7/8.1), I was looking for a front-end device that could replace the cumbersome keyboard and mouse. I prefer having all my media in a separate NAS, like the Synology DS1815+ - instead of a big, noisy PC.
My first significant replacement came with my adoption of Roku 3, which, combined with Plex, could do most of the Home Theater duties reasonably well. Roku has some limitations - it cannot play many movies directly and requires Plex to transcode many high-def films into a format it can display. Besides, it does not support speech recognition (the new version does) and is sometimes slow.
My first attempt to replace it came with my dismal attempt at using Amazon's New Fire TV. I could never open the remote's battery compartment and send it back to Amazon.
I decided to try it with a promising Nvidia Shield TV. Although I liked the idea of the new Apple TV, I did not like the fact that Apple's device did not support 4K TV standards nor specific foreign channels like etvnet.com
During Black Friday, I noticed that Nvidia's Shield TV with remote - generally priced at $249 - was offered at $149. I decided to give it a shot.
The Shield is an Android-powered box with a nice TV remote and a gaming controller.
It had Plex and Netflix already pre-installed. It could even run Kodi (XBMC), which I used on an HTPC for many years.
Although it had fewer channels than Roku, the Shield was very responsive to button presses, and speech recognition even worked with Plex! Searching and navigation were far easier with voice. However, voice search does not work with Netflix.
I have tried a few games on the Shield, but they are not appealing yet. However, as a streaming box, the Shield is great and can replace my HTPC forever.
My first significant replacement came with my adoption of Roku 3, which, combined with Plex, could do most of the Home Theater duties reasonably well. Roku has some limitations - it cannot play many movies directly and requires Plex to transcode many high-def films into a format it can display. Besides, it does not support speech recognition (the new version does) and is sometimes slow.
My first attempt to replace it came with my dismal attempt at using Amazon's New Fire TV. I could never open the remote's battery compartment and send it back to Amazon.
I decided to try it with a promising Nvidia Shield TV. Although I liked the idea of the new Apple TV, I did not like the fact that Apple's device did not support 4K TV standards nor specific foreign channels like etvnet.com
During Black Friday, I noticed that Nvidia's Shield TV with remote - generally priced at $249 - was offered at $149. I decided to give it a shot.
The Shield is an Android-powered box with a nice TV remote and a gaming controller.
It had Plex and Netflix already pre-installed. It could even run Kodi (XBMC), which I used on an HTPC for many years.
Although it had fewer channels than Roku, the Shield was very responsive to button presses, and speech recognition even worked with Plex! Searching and navigation were far easier with voice. However, voice search does not work with Netflix.
I have tried a few games on the Shield, but they are not appealing yet. However, as a streaming box, the Shield is great and can replace my HTPC forever.
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