@RamGuy said:
But how come my app in WebOS 3.0 refuses to Direct Play any of my H.265/HEVC or VP9 4K/UHD content if it works for you two? I don’t mind transcoding per say, but I like to build around direct play instead of transcoding as the server is not dedicated to Plex Media Server only so having it crunching 4K/UHD streams is something I would hope to avoid.
Did you ever get this to Direct Play?
Did you check to make sure you have “Original Quality” set?
@Monsters_Grin said:
I’d love to be able to do that
I brought that up with the devs. They would like for the app to be able to figure it out better on it’s own, but they are aware that there is desire to ensure a specific streaming method is used.
@KarlDag said:
I love the ShieldTV as a client. It does most recent codecs including HEVC, h264 lvl 5.1, HD audio streams, vc-1,etc without issues. Support casting to it. Supports hdmi-cec. Can plug in headphones in the remote.
You hit it there for me… VC-1. That codec makes up 16% of my library and I always can tell when a title is VC-1 by the sound of my computer’s fans picking up pace! So I much prefer to Direct Play VC-1 encoded content. The Shield and (surprisingly) the html5 app on the LG OLED TV can Direct Play VC-1 when I force it. I wonder what kind of hardware LG’s B-series line has that it can decode VC-1 and H.264/HLS, while the UI is still sluggish. Even Netflix and Hulu apps on webOS are sluggish compared to the Shield and Apple TV.
@kinoCharlino said:
@KarlDag said:
I love the ShieldTV as a client. It does most recent codecs including HEVC, h264 lvl 5.1, HD audio streams, vc-1,etc without issues. Support casting to it. Supports hdmi-cec. Can plug in headphones in the remote.You hit it there for me… VC-1. That codec makes up 16% of my library and I always can tell when a title is VC-1 by the sound of my computer’s fans picking up pace! So I much prefer to Direct Play VC-1 encoded content. The Shield and (surprisingly) the html5 app on the LG OLED TV can Direct Play VC-1 when I force it. I wonder what kind of hardware LG’s B-series line has that it can decode VC-1 and H.264/HLS, while the UI is still sluggish. Even Netflix and Hulu apps on webOS are sluggish compared to the Shield and Apple TV.
@kinoCharlino
They don’t name the SOC, but it’s quadcore… But more importantly, look at all those supported video formats!
@kinoCharlino said:
I brought that up with the devs. They would like for the app to be able to figure it out better on it’s own, but they are aware that there is desire to ensure a specific streaming method is used.
Thanks. It would be really nice to have the ability to force direct play, even in situations where bitrate is higher than available bandwith. If only could Plex take advantage of buffering properly - just like in the old days of Youtube, when you left the video paused for a few minutes to prevent playback from “catching up” to buffer .
Is it true that the LAN/Ethernet on the LG OLED B and C-series are only 10/100mbit and not Gigabit? If that’s the case I might be better of with using the built-in 802.11ac 2x2 WiFi, just like on the Apple TV.
I will be grabbing both a NVIDIA Shield TV and a Chromecast Ultra tomorrow and see how they work. I have no clue on that codec the Chromecast Ultra actually supports but it seems like a nifty devices for getting 4K YouTube and Plex to the TV without having to relaying on the slow apps in WebOS.
100mbit is still a lot of bandwidth for watching media…
It really depends on the file Size/Time. Some blu ray movies will fit on a 50GB, 66GB and 100GB discs. For the 50GB and 66GB movies, you would be fine with 100mb ethernet, but the 100GB will stutter and struggle.
4k movies downloaded from the internet will probably have a much lower bitrate than a blu ray disc to save on server bandwidth. So a 100mb connection will probably be fine.
The Apple TV doesn’t support 4k, so i can see why they only put a 100mb connection.
@KarlDag said:
- How do you know it’s 16% of your library? Is there a form of PlexPy in your dev build of Plex web?
Oh my… you crack me up!! That actually made my day, so kudos and thank you 
I don’t think I have to tell you that PlexPy is popular. We’re interested in enhancing PMP with more admin/management features, so stay tuned on that. I actually use PlexPy myself and that is how I came to the 16% figure… sorting by codec and doing the math myself. I did that because at one point I considered running all my VC-1 movies through Media Optimizer or even Handbrake, but I couldn’t do it… I just couldn’t! @BigWheel gives me a hard time about pixel-peeping I ran some tests and even though the results looked great out of Media Optimizer and Handbrake, just knowing that I ran my media through additional compression made me cringe. The media OCD in me wants everything to Direct Play to my big screen. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind transcoding, and think PMS is great for preparing all sorts of media for mobile devices. But for the big screen, I want the best image I can get
@KarlDag said:
2. You can have a pretty slow chip that has hardware decoding for certain codecs. Think of it this way, most computers with integrated graphics (more than a year or 2 old) can’t decode high bitrate hevc files because they don’t have that specific hardware decoder, while most non-ios smartphones released within about 3 years have HEVC covered without issue…
You’re spot on there. VC-1, from what I understand, can only use a single core… so that makes that codec really unfriendly.
Speaking of downloading 4K… anyone else notice the quality of Netflix’s “Super HD” content? I upgraded our plan to get the higher quality streams but it still seems very compressed, especially in the shadow areas with crushed blacks. My 1080p Blu-rays look better than Netflix’s “Super HD” content, whether they are played with our html5 or Apple TV apps. Somewhere I think I read Netflix’s “Super HD” is ~16Mbps, which depending on the movie, is half or less than half the bitrate of my 1080P Blu-rays. Arrgghhh first world problems 
So I bought the NVIDIA Shield TV and Chromecast Ultra. The Shield has been rather disappointing to be honest. The overall UI and feel just doesn’t feel as good as my Apple TV (Gen.4), that goes for the UI on the device itself (Android TV), the UI of Plex and also the UI for the YouTube-app.
The UI for YouTube seems to be using the standard “YouTube TV” UI from Google, and it’s simply inferior to what Google is offering on tvOS / Apple TV and that seems rather awkward. Especially my fiancee that watches YouTube on the TV every day was disappointed by the UI for the YouTube-app and how it’s inefficient compared to the one on the Apple TV with it’s vertical list of subscriptions etc…
The worst part for me is Plex. The Plex UI on tvOS / Apple TV is unique and it’s something we find better compared to the rest. But that’s not what bother us the most. The NVIDIA Shield TV is, for it’s hardware rather slow at loading in album arts for movies and TV-shows. And it doesn’t seem to cache it all that well? So most of the time while we scroll down our list of TV Shows we notice that the bottom row of icons are always empty and gets loaded on the fly causing a visual “lag”/“delay”.
It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s irritating and we can’t really figure why the Plex-app on Android TV and the NVIDIA Shield TV considering it’s hardware should be slower than our Apple TV. I guess it has something to do with caching, and the fact that it only features 16GB of Flash, compared to 64GB on the Apple TV makes Plex more limited in terms of caching.
Sadly, that’s not all. The playback seems fuzzy. Watching Westworld Episode 10 using the Plex-app on NVIDIA Shield TV compared to using the Plex-app on our Apple TV and even compared to using the Plex-app on WebOS 3.0 directly on our TV seems to offer the worst experience?
I, and even my fiancee that doesn’t normally notice subtle details like this notice that parts of the playback seems to have some subtle hiccups/lag and slowdowns. There was no warning about insufficient network speeds or anything but we could clearly notice choppiness in the playback that we have never noticed before when watching using the Plex-app on the Apple TV, or the one time we tested using the Plex-app in WebOS 3.0 on the TV itself.
I can’t for the life of me understand why a Direct Play, h.264, DD, MKV with a bitrate of 13mbps could ever cause frame drops, jerkiness, choppiness, whatever you like to call it but it was clearly there. Just to make sure it’s not the encode / source itself I re-watch the episode on the Apple TV and there was no problem using the Apple TV.
So all-in- all, this NVIDIA Shield TV has been a disappointment to us.
@RamGuy said:
So I bought the NVIDIA Shield TV and Chromecast Ultra. The Shield has been rather disappointing to be honest. The overall UI and feel just doesn’t feel as good as my Apple TV (Gen.4), that goes for the UI on the device itself (Android TV), the UI of Plex and also the UI for the YouTube-app.The UI for YouTube seems to be using the standard “YouTube TV” UI from Google, and it’s simply inferior to what Google is offering on tvOS / Apple TV and that seems rather awkward. Especially my fiancee that watches YouTube on the TV every day was disappointed by the UI for the YouTube-app and how it’s inefficient compared to the one on the Apple TV with it’s vertical list of subscriptions etc…
The worst part for me is Plex. The Plex UI on tvOS / Apple TV is unique and it’s something we find better compared to the rest. But that’s not what bother us the most. The NVIDIA Shield TV is, for it’s hardware rather slow at loading in album arts for movies and TV-shows. And it doesn’t seem to cache it all that well? So most of the time while we scroll down our list of TV Shows we notice that the bottom row of icons are always empty and gets loaded on the fly causing a visual “lag”/“delay”.
It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s irritating and we can’t really figure why the Plex-app on Android TV and the NVIDIA Shield TV considering it’s hardware should be slower than our Apple TV. I guess it has something to do with caching, and the fact that it only features 16GB of Flash, compared to 64GB on the Apple TV makes Plex more limited in terms of caching.
Sadly, that’s not all. The playback seems fuzzy. Watching Westworld Episode 10 using the Plex-app on NVIDIA Shield TV compared to using the Plex-app on our Apple TV and even compared to using the Plex-app on WebOS 3.0 directly on our TV seems to offer the worst experience?
I, and even my fiancee that doesn’t normally notice subtle details like this notice that parts of the playback seems to have some subtle hiccups/lag and slowdowns. There was no warning about insufficient network speeds or anything but we could clearly notice choppiness in the playback that we have never noticed before when watching using the Plex-app on the Apple TV, or the one time we tested using the Plex-app in WebOS 3.0 on the TV itself.
I can’t for the life of me understand why a Direct Play, h.264, DD, MKV with a bitrate of 13mbps could ever cause frame drops, jerkiness, choppiness, whatever you like to call it but it was clearly there. Just to make sure it’s not the encode / source itself I re-watch the episode on the Apple TV and there was no problem using the Apple TV.
So all-in- all, this NVIDIA Shield TV has been a disappointment to us.
That is very surprising to read. Did you make sure to check your rgb/4:4:4 and frame rate settings and make them match your tv?
I’ve played back a bunch of files with a ton of different codecs/parameters (h264/h265dd/dts/DTS-HD/truehd/23.976hz/1080p/4k/etc) and generally I have had very little issues.
As far as UI goes, well, personal preference. I haven’t tested the appletv’s, but with limited codecs and no kodi officially supported it wasn’t even an option for me.
Perhaps try using spmc/kodi with the new plex for kodi add-on?
@RamGuy said:
So I bought the NVIDIA Shield TV and Chromecast Ultra. The Shield has been rather disappointing to be honest. The overall UI and feel just doesn’t feel as good as my Apple TV (Gen.4), that goes for the UI on the device itself (Android TV), the UI of Plex and also the UI for the YouTube-app.The UI for YouTube seems to be using the standard “YouTube TV” UI from Google, and it’s simply inferior to what Google is offering on tvOS / Apple TV and that seems rather awkward. Especially my fiancee that watches YouTube on the TV every day was disappointed by the UI for the YouTube-app and how it’s inefficient compared to the one on the Apple TV with it’s vertical list of subscriptions etc…
I would agree with you on this. I also prefer the Apple TV UI over Android TV. The Plex app on the Shield follows Google’s Android TV Design Guide, just as the Plex for Apple TV app follows Apple’s tvOS Design Guide. In my experience, the Shield excels at playing a vast array of formats and codecs with Direct Play or Direct Stream, whereas the Apple TV has more limited codec support, so more content needs to be transcoded. That may not be an issue for most.
