When I started ripping my blu-rays and dvds back in the day, I left in the embedded PGS/VOSUB subtitles. I now know that goes against the common recommendations but Android TV clients seem to play them fairly well. That is one of the things that led me to the Shield devices. Also, I don’t think my TV can direct play those subtitles and it doesn’t have gigabit ethernet, so I just stick with the Shield.
I am glad I ran the tests and it has been a good learning experience. As far as weaknesses which I didn’t expect: I didn’t exactly know what to expect. I’m not an expert at this and the possibility that I set something up wrong in the chain was a real possibility. If I’m having a problem playing something, I’d like to figure out if it is something I can fix myself or if it is something inherent to the equipment and software that is essentially out of my control.
I was having problems for months playing some 1080p files on the Shield Tube that I don’t think should be too hard for a client to handle. Based on these tests I can assume it wasn’t a bitrate problem with my setup. I switched to the Shield Pro and they play fine. I still don’t quite understand what it is about certain files that caused that issue on the tube. I’ve seen people say it has something to do with the memory on the Shield Tube but that is beyond my capabilities to do anything about (other than switching devices). Here is a link to the thread if you care to look at it:
So, as both @Coxeroni and @rwoffice have mentioned, the Shield seems to be good up to 180Mbps of raw bitrate, and my setup seems to be good for that throughput. Now if I have problems playing something I can run the 180Mbps jellyfish test again to see if my network and NAS are still up to snuff. Then I can move onto other troubleshooting steps.
