www.makemkv.com

I've given up and gone to the HTPC side. I need something that plays all of my junk and this is a terrific solution, albeit pricey. It has set me back just under $1,000 (total with tax including remote). Compared to the ~$200 player solutions it's not a great value but it has no limitations that I can see and that is ultimately worth the cost when I re-read my OP.

A note about my Shield player. Last night, I started it up, and used VLC to watch 1.5 episodes of an anime series. It would have been more, except the Shield shut off mid-playback, and seems to be completely dead at this point. It's right at 1 year old...

Amazon has a $25 off promo on the 4K Fire TV stick, so I have one coming. It's $3 cheaper than a replacement remote for the one I'm missing. We'll see how that goes.

My biggest complaint with the FTV is that Vimu and VLC are completely ignoring subtitles by default, unlike the desktop version that defaults to playing the first subtitle track. Have to see if I can fix that.

Don't remember that being the case on my girlfriend's FireTV. In any case, you can playback a movie, select the tracks you want and then save this as default.

From that description, I should go back and re-play some episodes I watched earlier, to see if either program "remembers" the previous settings. It's less of a problem if I watch dubbed anime, but I have a LOT of subtitled stuff to watch. Maybe I'll fire up Plex on the Synology and see if it will feed the video with subtitles already applied.

I've already watched more stuff on the FireTV in the last few days than I was able to watch with the Shield in a year. ViMu and VLC have both crashed mid-episode occasionally, but started right back up, and the FTV itself didn't crash.