Hi,
so I’ve upgraded all my gear to 4K and the only part that I am struggling with to get right is Plex, unfortunately.
The Plex client built into my LG TV (webOS 3.0) is lackluster, it doesn’t play back 99.9% of all the 4K content I have. Plex server transcodes everything to 1080p.
The other Plex client I have is on the nVidia Shield, which plays back all the 4K content I have (even with HDR), but it has issues of its own (not going into details here, posted in the AndroidTV subforum if you’re interested).
So I am looking for an alternative. The key requirement is 4K playback without trouble. It should be able to play back h.264 4K content as well as HEVC (h.265) content with HDR like the shield does and it should have a very good upscaler (for all my 1080p content). It should just work 
What are your recommendations?
@cryptochrome said:
What are your recommendations?
wait a year.
until then, make do with Kodi and the Plex for Kodi addon on the shield or better still a NUC.
@trudge said:
until then, make do with Kodi and the Plex for Kodi addon on the shield or better still a NUC.
On a NUC I would install PMP embedded? Will that give me 4K, HEVC, BT2020 etc.?
@cryptochrome said:
@trudge said:
until then, make do with Kodi and the Plex for Kodi addon on the shield or better still a NUC.
On a NUC I would install PMP embedded? Will that give me 4K, HEVC, BT2020 etc.?
you can go with whatever software you want on the nuc, but you’ll want a kaby lake nuc which doesnt exist yet so you may as well play around on the shield you already have. The advantage to Kodi over PMP is it’s a more mature product so more likely to meet your “without trouble” requirement - the Plex Kodi addon may give you some grief but at least that is interface and UI issues rather than issues with the decoding pipeline and output quality. The advantage to to a nuc over the shield is that in 12 to 18 months when the world is all abuzz over AV1 and HVEC is on the way out you’ll at least have a path to get there. (unless you are happy buying a new box in 12 months)
Unfortunately I have issues with the Shield as such that neither Kodi nor lex can circumvent. It just doesn’t play well with my TV (all sorts of issues from crushed blacks to wrong colors), so I will definitely have to look at something different. PMP embedded is high on the list, once hardware is available that meets my requirements.
There’s nothing right now that I would recommend beyond the Shield at the moment, but then again there’s no real 4k HDR content yet. The samples from say LG and Samsung work great, but the other things that I’ve seen around are just horrible quality and people only get them because they say ‘2160p HEVC BT2020.’
The next Intel NUC based on Kaby Lake has HDMI 2.0a so it should be able to do what you want when it comes out, but it’ll probably take awhile for the bugs to get worked out. For example, the Broadwell NUCs just got lossless audio working right a few weeks ago.
@cryptochrome said:
Unfortunately I have issues with the Shield as such that neither Kodi nor lex can circumvent. It just doesn’t play well with my TV (all sorts of issues from crushed blacks to wrong colors)
I’m betting It’s not the Shield’s Plex or Kodi app, it’s the actual video you’re playing. I’ve gotten a few of these files for movies that I own, and even playing directly on the TV there’s banding, wrong colors, and other major issues.
@timstephens24 said:
I’m betting It’s not the Shield’s Plex or Kodi app, it’s the actual video you’re playing. I’ve gotten a few of these files for movies that I own, and even playing directly on the TV there’s banding, wrong colors, and other major issues.
Possible. I have tried a few other TV show episodes and movies now that are less dark overall and they look very good. But even in them I still have crushed blacks (the classic example: A black suit jacket where you can’t see the pocket or any other detail and it just looks like a black mass).
I also now tried using Plex for Kodi. It looks different but not better.
The worst of the Shield however is its terrible scaler. Upscaling 1080p to 2160p is nowhere even close as good as if I had my TV upscale it.
I hope all of this will get better when using PMP on a Kaby Lake NUC.
The colors on the Shield seem a little off for me too if I have it set to 4k@60Hz when I compare to every other device I have, so I do think there’s something going on there. 4k@23.976Hz I get the right colors, so I actually just keep it at 1080p@60Hz and use the Xbox One S or my TV’s apps for watching 4K Netflix/Amazon Prime/Vudu/etc.
