Not happy with ATV 4 as a player - Other player suggestions?

General Discussions
1

So essentially I had my Mac Mini as both player and server but I eventually switched to an Apple TV so I could have Plex, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu all on 1 input and in 1 interface… This is convenient but doesn’t work well. My guess is it’s due to the format of my media. My media is all .mkv and mostly AAC audio which means there is heavy transcoding going on. I thought maybe I could help performance by switching the server to my iMac to have it transcode as well. But I think again that was counter productive because the iMac has an AMD GPU as apposed to the Mac Mini Nvidia GPU (I believe Nvidia GPU has HW transcoding?). Anyway, I still want a box that has Netflix, Hulu, Plex etc… all in 1 interface and I’d like that interface to be nice/fluid but I don’t want the transcoding… so what are my options? Nvidia Shield has native .mkv and aac support with a fluid UI I believe? Would this be my only option? Thanks!

2

If you want an all in one, yes to the shield. However you could side load kodi onto the Apple TV and use plex kodi connect. But that involves jumping through a few hoops.

3

@Afullmark said:
If you want an all in one, yes to the shield. However you could side load kodi onto the Apple TV and use plex kodi connect. But that involves jumping through a few hoops.

What would that get me? Does Kodi have it’s own video engine (instead of using Apples built in video playback engine/API’s) for playback of MKV files? If not then there would still be transcoding… If it does have it’s own engine then it would definitely be worth taking a look at. I didn’t think you could side load on the ATV 4 yet?

4

Kodi uses its own playback engine.

5

@Afullmark said:
If you want an all in one, yes to the shield. However you could side load kodi onto the Apple TV and use plex kodi connect. But that involves jumping through a few hoops.

I think side load is an Android term. And I’m pretty sure the Apple TV hasn’t been jail broken since verstion 2.

Anyways, 90% of my media is in mkv and exclusively played on the Apple TV. There are some issues, but I’m general happy with it. Yes my audio is transcoded all the time but the video rarely is. I would think you might just have too weak of a server? I haven’t heard of just audio transcoding taxing most servers.