What do people currently recommend as the least troublesome player?

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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We have 4 TVs in the house, 2 Samsungs and 2 LG OLED’s, all purchased in the last 3 years. All are smartTV’s. All have varying troubles with their plex player when playing 4k content. Stuttering, video that looks like an acid trip, unable to play subtitles, trouble with TrueHD or other surround sound codecs, audio/video sync issues.

My plex server is a 6 drive synology DS1621+. It holds all the media and runs the plex server. It doesn’t run much else, Synology Drive Server and Hyper Backup - both of which are really only active from midnight to 6 am and shouldn’t put any load on the server during PlexTime.

Gigabit network. Only one of the TV’s uses wifi, the rest all have hard lines.

From what I gather these playback issues are a really common problem with the SmartTV players. It also seems that running the server on the Synology is also not great.

We had an apple TV hanging around, tried that, but still had some issues.

Ended up buying an Nvidia Shield and an Nvidia Shield Pro. Dramatically fewer problems. Almost every movie plays perfectly fine. Was planning on getting additional Shields for the other TVs. Then the Pro started being flakey. It will just become unresponsive to the remote, sometimes for several minutes. More recently, I could navigate in any direction but down. Very weird. I’m not sure what to make of it.

It also seems that Nvidia released both of these quite awhile ago and hasn’t updated the hardware since. Makes me wonder if they will continue the product.

Anyway, is there any kind of consensus out there on which media player is the most reliable and troublefree?

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Is the real problem running the server on the Synology? Presumably, it is great as a file host, but maybe what I really need is better server hardware? Should I use the NVidia Shield Pro as the server? Setup a PC to do it? I have several i5 kaby lake and coffee lake machines sitting around or could easily build a new rig with more current hardware.

Would appreciate community insights on what people believe to be the ideal player, server, and file host.

Server Version#: 1.31.1.6733
Player Version#:
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

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Direct play or transcoding? I run plex on a Synology and have an older 4k Sony smart TV but use Google TV dongle and ethernet connection. I have my media stored and set for direct play and have no trouble with 4k content. I use mkv or mp4 containers

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My current favorite client is the top end Roku.
I would also recommend that you run your server on the best computer possible.
Also I would NEVER use embedded apps on a TV.

The only problem is that not all clients support all formats and even good/great servers can have problems if transcoding is required. I try to keep all my media in a format that direct plays on my Rokus. That also means it direct plays on all the other clients I own.

One other thing I recommend not trying to keep the very high bit rate or ultra high resolutions for most content unless you really can see or hear the difference. Personally anything above 1080p is wasted on me and I have never met anyone that can really see much, if any, difference even between 1080p and 4K. There are many people that say they can see the difference but no one I actually know can really see the difference.

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Ideally direct play for everything.

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man, you gotta get a 4k LG OLED. You can see the freaking pores in people’s skin with closeups. For me, the difference between 4k and 1080p is quite dramatic. Now, I’m not sure that the .mkv for a 2 hour movie should be 80 gb!

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I aim to never have to transcode

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That seems excessive. The largest 4k file I have is about 30GB for a 3ish hour movie. I haven’t had much of any problems. That’s maybe small consolation but I’m not sure plex is the problem for you I suspect you’re asking too much of your smartTV and/or your server if you are expecting to serve several clients at once with 4k content

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Definitely, 4k content looks better than 1080p. The perception will depend on TV and source file though. I’m sceptical of a 2hour 4k movie of less than 15GB. Hardly a firm guide I know but I’ve tried some 10GB files and the image quality isn’t there, 4k might be but too much quality gone. An 80GB file is a huge amount of local bandwidth though

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Why would I waste my money just to see people’s pores? I do not want or need to see that. BUT I have seen many super high resolution TVs and I really do not see any difference.

But each to their own. I just do not see the difference many people do and I see no need to buy an expensive TV just to improve what others see. I almost never have visitors and, much more rarely, do I have someone over to watch TV.

It does seem to me that most people that claim to see important differences are doing so more to justify their expenditure than to honestly report what they see.

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There were Shield TV versions in 2015, 2017, and 2019. It still gets periodic software updates and there is no evidence it will be discontinued.

Many people say the current non-Pro Shield is significantly slower and can have trouble with high bitrate files. I would evaluate the current Shield offerings only based on the Pro.

Since you have Intel hardware sitting around I would absolutely spin up a new Plex server as a test at least. And I’d do it with Linux, not Windows.

My own setup is an ancient NAS for media storage, an i5-10400 server running Linux, with Shield, Roku, and Windows clients. Things work fine, including transcoding/tone mapping 4k HDR files. (I don’t even have any 4k displays, maybe in a few more years!) YMMV

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The least troublesome client is the Nvidia Shield Pro.

I’ve the 2015 model and it direct plays everything I throw at it.

If it died today I would buy another one in a heartbeat. I’ve no qualms that the current model was introduced in 2019. My 2015 model still receives Android updates just like the more recent models.

The original remote (the old “slider” model) died a few years ago and I replaced it with a cheap remote bought on Amazon.

If you want to passthrough lossless audio such as TrueHD + Atmos and dts:X, then go with the Shield Pro.

My setup: Shield <—> Denon AVR <—> LG B7 OLED

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I have an NVidia Shield Pro on each of my 3 LG OLED TVs.
Playback is very smooth w/ full 4K HDR, Dolby Vision/Atmos and/or the full HD audio sound track.

Due to loosing 2 of my W7MC HTPCs I am also using 2 of them as replacements for live TV w/ HDHR prime and ATSC3.0 tuners.
I get all of my subscribed cable channels including ones w/ DRM flags and audio on the ATSC3.0 OTA broadcasts except the one that is locked w/ DRM. Not too bad for $200.

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Check and make sure on the wired TVs they have 10/100/1000MB Ethernet ports and they are connecting at 1GB/s (1000MB). My Sony TV could play 4K content but only had a 10/100MB card. My 4K content sometimes needed more than 100MB/s. The two 1GB connections on my server were not the problem and I installed a NVDIA Shield TV Pro wired to my network (it has a 1GB network connection) and it worked fine after that because it could stream more than 100MB/s.

On the wireless, and this is a common problem, your wireless network has to be rock-solid. Ethernet backbones between multiple access points so the entire load is not on one or two APs, and there is a close option for the player. I had Cisco AIR-1130s and that did not cut it. I have four APs throughout my house and I ended upgrading them to Ubiquit U6-Enterprise with a Raspberry PI4B running the control of those access points.

It is common for me to set up a hi-def short-throw projector on my 100-inch screen with a Vizio 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos soundbar with sub and rear surrounds behind me. I had to build a metal structure that I attach to the top of my screen to redirect the Atmos speakers to my overhead since there is no ceiling outside to do that. The sound bar is mounted to brackets on the bottom of the frame. I even have the wiring all clean and a NVDIA Shield TV for streaming the content even though it does not do 6GHz as far as its radio, it runs great on the 5GHz radio and my access point is on the other side of an exterior wall. I get several hundred MB/s connection on that Shield. With me going Shield to Soundbar’s HDMI input to HDMI eARC out to the projector I never have any problems. I pull 4K content without any problem. My largest stream is Gemini Man and it streams at 145MB/s and it looks great.

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I’m on a similar quest as you and also made a thread as I didn’t see this one.

Im going to buy a Nvidia Shield TV pro to test this week and see how it handles various codecs and high bitrate 4K uhd blu ray rips. Will report back how it holds up!

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Hmm so I had a Shield TV pro (2019) for a few days and for $200 USD +tax here in the US, I wasn’t expecting ads to be on the device and was overall a bit disappointed.

While on Ethernet it did play pretty much everything I threw at it (with 1-2 exceptions), however over Wi-Fi on a pretty stable 350 mbps connection it stuttered a lot. It couldn’t play my 4K uhd remux of Akira (1988) if I had the Japanese audio track selected and English subtitles active. It stuttered heavily and would not play more than 2 seconds at a time. Very weird because switching to the English audio track everything played as it should.

I also found the UI to be sluggish/unresponsive at times and would completely lock up the Shield. Had to unplug the power cable several times to get it to be responsive again. Was not expecting that from a $200 device!

So unfortunately I returned the shield as I’m def not a fan of the speed of the OS and the way it operates. So for me Plex HTPC or Infuse on Apple TV 4K is the superior client in 2023. I’ve never seen either one of those clients lag, stutter or have playback issues and they always work.

My 2 cents regarding the Shield.

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The Shield Pro is four years old now, getting close to five, and while it does have much more codec support than any other Android device, although Amazon is slowly getting closer, it isn’t what most users praise it to be in my opinion. I’ve had one for a few years now and when it first came out it blew everything away but the last year or so it has just gotten worse and worse when it comes to being sluggish and unresponsive. The current price tag is a joke. It is nowhere near worth the new price anymore.

Being as most movies launch digitally before physical now and infuse handles EAC Atmos just fine, I find myself using my apple tv far more than my shield lately. Strange that no one is interested in bringing out a device that supports all codecs.

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I have read that some of the no-name Android boxes with good chipsets make super Plex media machines. For example:

https://www.amazon.com/Streaming-Certified-Assistant-Vision-Atmos-Bluetooth/dp/B0BMLJ84LQ

However, I have been unable to find really detailed reviews on these alternatives.

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I agree the shield pro is the best that I’ve used, but do any of you have kids with kid profiles? We have a shield pro in our basement ‘theater’ for best performance with Plex and most other apps, but FireTV’s everywhere else in the house.

I hate the FireTV’s as they basically become obsolete every 2 years performance wise, but they do a much better job at handling kid profiles. The Shield TV isn’t really geared towards that. But it’s coming time to replace some of our FireTV’s, and with them moving to a Linux vs Android base I’m not sure what apps they are going to break along the way (albeit I’m sure just temporarily).

Don’t take that as Linux hate, all my servers are Linux I just don’t trust there to be full app support on Amazon immediately with their approval process.

And I can’t go to Roku, as their hardware doesn’t support ChannelsDVR which we use heavily for live TV.

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