It looks like the shield will be £134 here in the uk today on amazon. I’ve got a £15 off code so £119 seems like a bargain!
I currently use a 2011 Mac mini as a headless server but I would quite like it back as a normal computer to sort my photos out. But so far it’s been great as a plex server and even decided HEVC h.265 fine.
So what’s people’s experience with the 16gb Shield since it it the update to better support external storage so plex database works better. Is it ok?
I’ve read the shield supports hardware HEVC deciding. Does that work ok?
Just wondering if I will get similar performance to my Mac mini or noticeably worse.
Well if you have a sizable library, you can adopt storage to the usb 3.0 port to expand system memory thus housing your meta data with ease. I have a synology 918 as media network storage and can use the nvidia shield as server. I have basically retired my Mac mini 2010 from server service since the shield can easily handle all functions better than the mini. The shield has had no problems playing back any hevc that I have thrown at it. The performance should be much better if my 2010 Mac mini is any indication.
Cool, thanks. More interested now if your getting on ok although I don’t have a NAS so will be using USB 3 drives but I will only have one socket with having to take me up for the Plex data. Grrr. Wish it still had an SD slot
While the player on the shield can play quite a bit. if you need more than one or two transcodes at any time I would stick with a computer for your server.
I personally use the Shield as my favorite player, though I have a test server on it, it could never handle the amount of use I require since I often have like 4-5 folks streaming at once and they are often transcoding.
I can imagine but I don’t shate mine with anybody other than my family and at most we have 2 streams so it should be ok for our light use. But I’m thinking of sticking with the old Mac for flexibility.
The main problem for me with the USB storage on the shield was, that it is not shared in the network (smb or nfs). So there is no possibility to add new media over the network, which is a must for me. That is why I attached my USB drive to a chromebox running ubuntu and use this as a “server”.
If you worry about the number of USB ports, just use a (powered) usb hub and you are good to go. I use a speedy Sandisk 128 GB USB stick as adopted storage and this seems to work fine.
