@JuiceWSA said:
I don’t need a glorified game-boy to play media.
Your perception of the Shield is that of someone who knows very little about it. Anyone who is serious about home media (i.e. home theater enthusiasts that use Plex) knows the Shield to be much more than a “glorified game-boy”. Its robust video and audio codec support (yes, more than your precious Roku) makes it a great device for playing back full blu-ray rips.
The Roku is a solid all-around performer, but its performance and capabilities are not up to task with the shield. The shield is certainly a niche product, but it is hardly reserved to gaming.
@cayars said:
I have a modern Samsung 75" and still don’t use Plex on the TV and will use a different device
Same here. Tons of “smart” crap on my Samsung 75" that is really not very “smart” at all, slow UI and cumbersome to use. Plus I don’t want to backfeed the audio from the TV back into the AVR. For the sake of simplicity, a separate box to handle the apps is the way to go, and your TV is nothing but a dumb video panel. Also means you don’t have to upgrade your expensive TV as often since you’re not dependent on it for these apps which ran slow on its lame CPU on day one.
I personally don’t worry about smart features on TVs I purchase since I’d never use them anyway. They just can’t compare to a dedicated hardware box designed for that job. Just my opinion.
Not just yours. 
Hey! Something we agree on!
@spikemixture said:
Surprisingly no one has talked about getting your library correctly formatted.
If ALL your library was formatted as mp4 for plex this hardware discussion would be much shorter.
I have way too much content to deal with that. Life is too short. Plex has the feature to handle this so I don’t have to think about it, so I invested once in sufficient hardware and then wiped my hands clean of having to worry about that or waste time (and video quality) re-transcoding everything every time I get new content.
DLNA sucks. If you use that, why use Plex at all.
One issue I have with the Shield is that it’s just plain ugly. And unnecessarily large. I migrated from the Roku to a Raspberry Pi 2 running Rasplex, but the Roku still gets used plenty and works fine both in the living room and elsewhere (we have 4 Rokus in the house).
