After reading a bunch of posts about people saying the Nvidia Shield is pretty much the only way to play 4K content without transcoding, I picked the new Shield Pro up for $200. I’m sad to report Plex on the new Shield Pro looks significantly worse than simply using VLC to play the 4K video “directly” using DLNA. Plex on the Shield also transcodes on the server which is very disappointing.
For $200 it’s a much better deal to pick up a 4K Apple TV and install VLC on it.
Plex really needs to add a feature flag to the players to force transcoding off. There’s no good reason for a brand new Nvidia Shield Pro to play transcoded videos.
You don’t give us any information about your tv or avr or how they are connected.
Nor do you provide any settings, such as whether hdmi passthrough is enabled in both shield and plex settings.
In any case, shield should be direct playing most anything, if properly configured, it is the only mainstream device that can pass through HD audio, and handle most subtitles.
plex is adding an option to disable transcoding (still a work in progress), however all that means is, if the client cannot direct play/direct stream, it WON’T PLAY AT ALL.
I have a 2019 shield pro, and it direct plays everything I throw at it. Tell us more about the rest of your setup, that might help us find the culprit…
Where are you running the server? One thing that could be going on is if the app thinks it’s accessing the server remotely, and the remote play settings (on either the server or client) are set to a lower bandwidth. Settings-remote access on the server, video quality - internet streaming on the client.
The other thing to check is the settings on the shield - resolution and audio support.
Finally, are you running subtitles? Sometimes this will cause a transcode.
You can look at what’s going on in the dashboard while you’re paying the media. Start playing on the shield, then open app.plex.tv/desktop, look at the dashboard, and it’ll tell you what’s transcoding.
