I don’t want to start a war here, but I am curious about performance on some of the popular clients such as Fire TV, Shield, Roku, Raspberry Pi…
I have a pretty capable server, Xeon e3 1220v3, 16Gb ecc ram, running Freenas 11 and the Plex jail is on an ssd (it definitely runs faster…at least loading album art and stuff like that).
My main TV is on a HTPC with an i5 3570k running windows 7. I built it in 2013 as an htpc for WMC and it has been running great since. This is also acting as my main plex client as it is the screen we watch most things on.
I found Plex about 2 years ago and have loved it, especially adding live tv and dvr. Still waiting for all the kinks to be worked out, but in the mean time I am looking to add support to my other tvs. I don’t want to build an expensive/large HTPC and then also need keyboard/remote for them if I can be happy with a cheaper and for my wife and children easier device to use.
I have a Fire TV Stick and it works well, but is not as quick from screen to screen, and also it seems to require some transcoding as when I try to skip commercials, it takes a few moments to begin playing again where my HTPC is instant. Would a device that supports the proper codecs/file types see the same responsiveness? If so, what devices work best for that? Obviously the Fire TV Stick is out, although it performs admirably for its cost, I am willing to spend a bit more for even better results.
Thanks for any input/advice
My opinion… The shield hands down is the best streaming device… period!
FireTV 2 and 3 both support mpeg2 playback as well so these respond better… not sure about the fire stick2. The FireTV 1s /sticks do not support mpeg2 from what I see.
I personally don’t like the look and feel of the Roku’s
I have no experience in the Pi market other than I believe you need to buy the mpeg2 license for it.
I’m a Roku guy. It’s my default go to for Plex. Recently they updated their fleet of devices, and the smallest one, the Express, (currently on sale at Amazon for $25) is 5x faster than it used to be.
A guru could get into all sorts of complexities about compatibility and programming for the Roku, which from what I understand, there are some hurdles on the back end. It just works for me. Even the cheap old one did the job.
Roast the $25. If you don’t like it, give it to Mom and Dad for Christmas.
no “answer” just trying to stop that annoying reminder
+1 for Shield TV.
Reason: It basically Direct Plays everything.
I’m trying to get away from using Handbrake, etc to transcode movies. Goal is to rip the DVD/Blu-ray and load it into Plex. The most I want to do to a file is modify chapter names, etc.
The Shield lets me do this. Supports all the necessary audio/video codecs. Dolby up to Atmos, dts up to dts:X. Haven’t run into a problem yet w/ MPEG2 or H264 video. I don’t yet have any 4K/H264 or 4K/H265/HDR content other than a few test files, but the Shield has no problem streaming 4K HDR movies from Netflix & Amazon (Shield supports HDR10 but not Dolby Vision, at least for Netflix 4K streams).
This also provides flexibility where to run PMS. Since I’m not transcoding much, I don’t need a i7-8xxx cpu for PMS. I run PMS on the Shield TV and on my Synology 918+ NAS (Celeron CPU).
I also have an Amazon Fire TV Gen 2. It is a fine streaming box. However, it supports less codecs than the Shield. For example, it has no support for Dolby Atmos nor dts of any flavor, which forces audio transcoding for many movies from blu-rays. Audio transcoding doesn’t hit the CPU very hard, but why do it if I can avoid it? FYI AFTVg3 does support Atmos.
Can’t speak to Roku or Pi. Never tried Plex on those platforms.
Obviously I’m using just a small part of Plex’s capabilities. No Live TV / DVR. No remote users. No music (yet). However, for how I’m using Plex, the Shield is the best STB I’ve found.
Shield TV <–HDMI–> Denon 4300H <–HDMI–> LG OLED55B7P
Amazon Fire TV Tech Specs
Shield TV Click on “See Full Specs” for details.
