For the last zillion years, I’ve been watch TV primarily via my Amazon Fire TV (1st Generation). It’s well passed it’s best and I need to upgrade.
I was excited about the Chromecast with Google TV but just had it confirmed by BBC, that they don’t have any immediate plans to add BBC iPlayer to it and I’m pretty sure All4 is the same which is basically a big fat no from me as along with Plex and Netflix, they’re the only other apps I use.
So now the question is, what do I do now? I don’t want to buy something just for those apps and then find the Plex app doesn’t work very well on it.
I’ve been looking at the nVidia Shield TV stick which looks great. But I probably also could do with a TV upgrade (that’s older than the amazon fire box!). If I got an LG TV, is the plex app any good on WebOS?
It’s times like these I wish the government just issued you a standard TV box and that was all. Gadget Communism.
As for a “smart” TV, my advice has nothing to do with Plex, just TVs in general: I will never again buy a TV for the “smart” features. My first, and so far only, “smart” TV is a Vizio. I was all excited about the web-connected features, and found a few that I liked. But after one year, they upgraded their platform to a new version, and all the apps were upgraded to work on the new platform, and support for my TV’s “smart” features evaporated almost immediately.
I can pretty much guarantee that I will never buy another Vizio after being abandoned like that. But I also decided that my future would always be a TV plus a streaming device, like a Roku or Shield, etc. If I could get a “dumb” TV from a company that put their engineering efforts into high quality picture, sound, and manufacturing, I’d be all over it.
Yeah, cheers for this. That was my main worry with smart TVs. They become pretty dumb very quickly!
I only have a 32in 12 year old Sony TV but it does the job (unless that job is being big enough to properly read stuff on PS4 games!)
I wholeheartedly recommend the nVidia Shield Pro, because it doesn’t choke even on 4K HEVC files with a large bitrate. (something which the “Tube” version sometimes struggles with)
And IMHO the integrated AI upscaler is worth the money alone, when you watch a lot of animation which is stored in lesser resolutions on your server.
