thrillcat wrote: ↑Sat Feb 29, 2020 3:55 am
Nvidia Shield
Since this topic was apparently intended to be a rant, I'll rant some.
I read a lot about the Shield, but, so far, it looks like I'll have to dedicate a week or so to learning obscure magic spells to make it useful. And maybe another week making it capable of doing all the wonderful things it allegedly can do.
Note: the store I bought it from didn't have a demonstration set up working, because none of their technical staff had figured it out yet. Even the Nvidia demo wouldn't work.
I honestly think that making media players based on Android was a big step backwards in ease-of-use. YOU can make it do ANYTHING. Emphasis on YOU doing it, because the flexibility comes at a price of no one actually giving a damn about selling a WORKING configuration.
I was accustomed to players like the Asus, Uebo, and KDLinks 7xx-series that, once you told them about your network, you found the video you wanted to play, and hit play. Sometimes there was a firmware update to add a new feature (PGS subtitle support, for example), but you didn't have to reconfigure everything when the update finished and the box was rebooted.
The problem was Asus stopped doing updates, and the hardware on Uebo/KDLinks units lasted about 13.5 months (12 month warranty), then stopped booting.
So, I stepped into the world of Android-based players with the KDLinks A-300. Before
its hardware died (at 14 months), the build-in Android video player was the only thing that worked reasonably reliably. Kodi flat-out sucked, because I didn't have time to figure out how to get it to talk to a network without linking it to ever shared directory individually; how to get it to display subtitles when it was supposed to and not when it wasn't supposed to; but it came
pre-configured to act as a bittorrent client! Well, my NAS isn't configured as a torrent server, just DLNA and SMB.
It got worse with future Android-based devices, where they came with Kodi completely unconfigured.
Finally, I spent the big bucks to get the supposed greatest device on the market, the Nvidia Shield. Not only does Kodi come unconfigured, it complains that it needs to update just about every time I boot the thing. The Android video player, which used to work with most of the files I have, no longer works, so it's Kodi or nothing. And the menu system, for some reason, offers up everything you've already watched as suggested videos to watch again, pushing new content further down.
When I did get it working for a while, I did not see a way to say, "Play all the files in this directory in order". It would play each one, then go back to the menu, and I could scroll back down to the next file and hit play again.
The TV the Shield is attached to used to be used every day; it's been on maybe 10 times in the year since the Shield got attached to it, because it take 20 minutes to go through updates to the operating system, Kodi, Kodi add-ons, and other stuff I don't use, THEN I can configure the network for Kodi AGAIN, because the update to Kodi removed the last configuration.
People tell me there are add-ons to make all of this work, but they can't seem to think of what they are when asked for examples.
I don't need 4K HDR Dolby Video 47.9 HYPEr definition audio. I just want to watch stuff without spending 20 minutes preparing to watch stuff. And the only way I can currently do that is at my computer workstation, running VLC, with stereo speakers. Find the file I want to watch, double click, and sit back in my uncomfortable chair to watch it. Or use the Android-based FireTV stick via wifi, and deal with the network drop-outs.
