I just finished setting up a custom router with dns ad blocking. Next comes a media player so I can purge this smart TV filth from my household.
Huge shout out to Louis Rossmann and the FUTO communuty contributors, check out the wiki on self-hosted software if you haven’t already.
Apple TV was the best media thing I’ve bought in over a decade. No ads ever, incredibly responsive (league of its own compared to stuff like Roku), and is able to stream from my Jellyfin server. Beautiful interface, fast, clean, simple controller with a battery life that is easily over a year. Just a really good product. Roku can suck by nuts. Literal full page ads in a product that advertises that it has zero of them. Even the most expensive version. Fuck Roku.
I’ve found the shield pro is better, especially for customizability.
Isn’t that Android? Sorry, not touching Android unless it’s something like Calyx or Graphene or lineage. I’ll just build myself a pc to connect to my TV if I wanted to go anywhere near that.
Have you used an Apple TV or are you just claiming that the shield is better because you like customizing things more?
Same here. One is the best made TV boxes period.
how does it go for codec support out of Jellyfin? I’m starting to collect and also rip AV1 content, which is fine for computers and phones (and my newer TV does it natively), but trying to find a streambox that wouldn’t need to transcode it is proving harder than expected
Have a previous gen 4K, and have not encountered any issues with Jellyfin on streaming. There’s a spectacularly annoying bug that you lose your config if the atv is full to capacity - and with kids in the house it means frequent logins are required. The iOS client also seems to lag on features and updates compared to the other clients, but other than that niggle it’s been great.
You’re talking about Streamyfin right? Yeah I’ve had so many issues with that. I just use infuse, but infuse is terrible for actually sorting and categorizing stuff. And it slows down massively with large libraries. I got to around 850 movies and it suddenly bogged down like crazy. Like, the Apple TV is super responsive still, but the app just has trouble loading each successive movie.
Shield pro is the best, end of story
Are they still making those or are they all 5+ years old (2019 was latest I could find on eBay)?
the age of the device put me off, it still runs android 11 as well apparently. I wouldnt want to buy one now and then a refresh comes out
It’s still the best streaming device hands down. There’s not even any competition.
The last model they made was 2019. I highly doubt we’ll see a refresh.
Yep, all 5 years old. I don’t see a need for another one quite yet when even the newest streaming devices still don’t measure up.
Any issues popping up (especially from the old version of Android)?
No, it’s smoother than even my brand new Google TV chromecast that it replaced. I replaced the default launcher with something easier for my elderly mother to understand because she kept getting confused with other devices. It’s snappy, has all the apps I have needed, and was easy to set up. New apps are still developed and updated for it too since it’s so popular, and ostensibly the best pre-built streaming device short of manually configuring a mini pc. I don’t see software support officially or from the app developers dropping any time soon because of that.
Perfectly. I’ve never encountered a codec my Apple TV couldn’t play smooth as butter. Been watching a lot of AV1 anime lately, never needs to transcode. I use Infuse Player for its Dolby Vision support, because that’s the only format the native Jellyfin app has trouble with, but Infuse is also just a really solid app in general, and for me is the perfect way to consume my Jellyfin server. But the native Jellyfin app is also solid, and there are some other players which would definitely meet your needs (MrMC for example is very good, but not as polished as Infuse).
Use Infuse as your playback client. It will direct play AV1. However there is no hardware decoding support for it. But the processor is fast enough to do it in software for 24fps 4K. But not 60fps.
Current gen iPhone chips do AV1 hardware decoding. And the AppleTV uses the same processor, just a few generations behind. The next AppleTV hardware refresh may add AV1 hardware support. But that’s just a guess.
I agree. I switched from Roku to apple tv recently (and I don’t really have apple devices), and it was worth it.