In the process of upgrading to 4K (I know im a long way behind lol), the panel im considering is a Panasonic OLED which doesn’t support Plex natively unfortunately. At present I have a Synology DS1815+ 2.4GHZ quad core with 8GB ram, and a Mid 2011 Mac mini connected vid GBLAN and HDMI to TV. I know the Mac mini won’t handle 4K unless I buy a new one.
Wondering what my best options are here to support all formats without transcoding which is why I went with the Mini in the first place. Will anything else do this? Im thinking Nvidia Shield or Chromecast Ultra will do the job or am I better off biting the bullet and updating the Mac mini?
AFAIK the Nvidia Shield is the only Plex client that is HDR capable. There are others that will handle 4K e.g. Roku Ultra, Amazon Fire TV 4K, Latest Apple TV or my current favourite Plex client the Odroid C2 (like a Raspberry Pi but 4x faster) running OpenPHT.
Thanks nigelpb ill check out the odroid c2, I do like the look of the Nvidia shield, is there any down falls with this? As I said im after a device to natively play everything. The NAS can handle transcoding of a lot of stuff but im not sure it will handle transcoding 4K, LAN is no issues as its GB and backed by UBNT edge router and switch. Not worried about spending some coin on this as the last time I invested heavily in this it was done right and served its purpose for many many years.
@“Michael Dawson” said:
Thanks nigelpb ill check out the odroid c2, I do like the look of the Nvidia shield, is there any down falls with this? As I said im after a device to natively play everything. The NAS can handle transcoding of a lot of stuff but im not sure it will handle transcoding 4K, LAN is no issues as its GB and backed by UBNT edge router and switch. Not worried about spending some coin on this as the last time I invested heavily in this it was done right and served its purpose for many many years.
I recently got a Shield for HDR playback. It will play anything you throw at it.
The downside is the UI isn’t the prettiest, but man its fast!!! The Ui isn’t really an issue though especially if you only have one server. The remote is great but strangely despite having a Harmony remote ARC works fantastically well and i’m almost always reaching for my standard Samsung TV remote.
If you want to future proof yourself as much as possible go for the Shield. If you are happy with your current server setup then the standard will suffice. If you have any thoughts at all about the Shields server abilities you will need the higher storage capacity of the Shield Pro I believe.
+1 for the Shield. Direct plays everything I throw at it.
Three things to note:
Shield TV does not support Dolby Vision, only HDR10. That said, Plex does not support Dolby Vision right now either. See Dolby Vision thread.
The Shield Pro, w/ 500GB internal drive, is discontinued. Running PMS on the 16GB Shield is problematic due to lack of internal storage (scan Shield TV section of forum and you’ll see the postings…). Plex & Nvidia are working on a fix, but not available yet.
For music, Shield does not support Apple Lossless (ALAC). Any music in ALAC will be transcoded.
Shield also supports 4K HDR from Netflix and Amazon. If your TV does not have those apps built in, then you can use the Shield to pick up their HDR streams. Note that Netflix has some content in Dolby Vision + Atmos. It streams to the Shield as HDR10 + 5.1 audio. Still looks great. Just mentioned it for full disclosure.
I’ve had my Shield for a little over a year. Big fan. Head and shoulders above my Amazon Fire TV gen2, which does not support TrueHD, Atmos, or any flavor of dts (AFTV v3 does support Atmos. See FireTV Specs.)
OpenPHT that runs on the Odroid C2 & many other devices is basically Kodi (LibreELEC actually) under the covers with a Plex front end. This means all the richness of the Kodi media player with the Plex library & metadata. It’s due a new version as it’s based on an older version of Kodi so I’m guessing that it will then support HDR. The user interface is apparently like the now cancelled Plex Home Theatre.
OpenPHT s available for Windows, Mac & Linux so you can easily try it out. The Odroid C2 is a better dedicated platform than the Raspberry Pi as it is much faster & has hardware enabled h.265 playback. It’s also less than half the price of an Nvidia Shield.
Thanks everyone great info and saved me a lot of time collating it all. The Shield sounds great apart from the no support for Dolby Vision. Im assuming that even when Plex supports Dolby Vision it will still be a no go on the Shield? With the ODroid it will support everything including HDR 10 and Dolby Vision? Im assuming it will also support all audio streams like Auro3D DTSX and Atmos as its simply passing these through to the AV receiver? Thanks
Ended up biting the bullet and purchased the Shield TV, very impressed so far (2 weeks) plays almost everything with no transcoding and a very nice interface.
