Couple of Quick Questions: I’m moving my stream client (not server) from a Roku Premiere to a Shield Pro and after setup I have a couple of quick questions I could not find from searching the forum.
I selected to not enable the plex server during setup (my server is running on dedicated hardware) but I was wonder if it would be better to uninstall the plex media server from the shield ?
Is there a dedicated plex client for shield or is it Plex for Android (TV) app ?
The shield has an AI up-scaling feature. For SD or 1080p content is this really worth it ? Have not enabled it yet myself but wanted to ask the community for their opinions.
On the roku we can click on a cast member in a show or movie and it will then filter on which other shows or movies they are in giving you the list. When I try and do this on the shield nothing happens. Is this a bug or has this just not been implemented yet ?
Overall pretty happy with the shield over the roku. Snappy UI. Video content always either direct played or direct stream on the roku premiere but some audio content would transcode but is now direct playing which is exactly what I wanted.
Not yet implemented. Cast member pictures are a relatively recent addition to the Plex Android TV app. Hopefully the select & filter capability will be added at some point.
Will certainly be keeping the roku as a backup, shield is really good and will become the primary device.
However comparing the plex app on roku with the android TV is really interesting. Not really one UI consistency between apps. Lots of subtle differences which are really objious when you have both devices.
The Roku World orbits it’s star cleanly in the Goldilocks Zone. It has blue skies and puffy white clouds. It’s surface is covered with flowery meadows populated with butterflies and bunnies.
The Android World is about a million years after the Late Heavy Bombardment where islands of newly formed crust float on oceans of molten rock.
There are no subtle differences.
My Android experience has only THREE things going for it:
when I hit pause - I don’t have an OSD fly up in my face.
30 forward and 10 back is still a thing.
Skip Intro works pretty good - as it doesn’t dump me out 6-10 seconds before the break, right in the middle of a wall of horns in the Intro Closer (so all that time if spend in their detection - I never get to use 'cause I’ve bailed on the Android App by that time).
Right now, I only use the android when I want to watch something I’ve added to the library with HEVC/x265 video. I have a couple of really old Rokus that can’t direct play that format. So I either fumble through the jumbled menus on the Android to find what I want to watch, or start it from the Roku, let it transcode for a couple of minutes, and then use the play from beginning option from Continue Watching on the Android to watch the movie.
All my 1080p content is x265 encoded. Roku Premium will direct stream it but my daughters older roku 3 will not.
Speaking purely from a UX standpoint the android TV plex app is not that different to the roku one. The delta is noticeable when coming from one to the other with the most serious being the cast filter. It’s a feature we use pretty much always when we watch movies and we’ll miss it on the android version of the app.
Other stuff is somewhat cosmetic. TMDB icon is missing on ratings, if you filter on say unwatched movies there is no counter saying how many are unwatched. These are two other example of stuff the roku has but has android TV does not. I’d hope overtime it’ll consolidate and align together. We’ll see.
Mine as well (mostly) - Roku Ultras ($65) handle it all - I don’t feed them any Super Duper Audio they or my other equipment won’t deal with natively.
I have a FireTV 'cause I have Amazon Prime and like FireTV for that stuff - it’s almost like it’s made for it, ya know? Anywho, I’ve had a FireTV ever since the very first box came out and in that time span Plex has NEVER been able to develop an app for any of them that was worth using - and this latest disaster is just more of the same.
I have ZERO confidence a decent app will EVER be developed, but I have a FireTV so I’ll know if it ever happens.
The 4th thing I get from the FireTV - it will display image based subs without a transcode. Another reason I’d like to use it occasionally, but until an app arrives that doesn’t require a Force Stop/Clear Cache before and while I’m using it when it blows straight up and won’t respond - I’m certainly not going to be spending a lot of time trying to use it.
Thousands of us are waiting ('cause we have nowhere else to go) for a great FireTV (android) app to arrive. We want it to work. We want to be amazed. Amaze us.
I’m using automatic home and it’s fine on both. But I do have only 1 movie and 1 tv library so I’m not dealing with the multiple recently added if that’s what you are referring to.
It’s actually a lot worse on Android clients than it is on Roku, that was my point. On Roku you can switch to Manual Home and put the Home screen back the way it was before the multiple rows. On Android you can’t.
I understand you aren’t using multi libraries but I didn’t know that at the time. It’s just one negative of using a Shield Plex client. I just leave it in Automatic Home.
With multiple libraries on Roku if you go to Manual Home it puts Recently Added from all libraries on one row. On Android you can get it down to one row but it’s one library only and it’s a crap shoot on which library it will be.
