"Best" TV box for Plezy?

[Joloxx9]

What is the currently best device for Plezy? I am going to try it on latest apple tv, but due to various factors I was thinking about nvidia shield pro, unless there is another "gem" that can play nearly all formats?

[nx6]

Kinda a toss-up on what you want most. I have both a Shield Pro and a Fire Stick 4K Max (current gen).

• The Shield is the smoothest with the Plezy UI. It has a more performant SoC and it has more memory. But the Apple TV would be higher performance still from a SoC perspective.
• The Fire Stick supports direct play of more video formats. The Shield hardware does not support AV1, for example.
• The Fire Stick cannot play Dolby Vision Profile 7 though (the profile used on 4K UHD Blu-rays). The Shield can (MEL only).
• If you also use other streaming services, you should note the Shield cannot support HDR on YouTube (the Shield does not support the specific codec profile YouTube uses for HDR). But this is not an issue with Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, etc.
• The Shield can bitstream DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD Atmos. The Fire Stick has these listed on its spec sheet but I feel like I've heard TrueHD bitstreaming does not work (?) or DTS-HD only does the Core portion of the audio. Someone with a home theater setup would have to confirm this. Maybe I can play around later tonight on my living room TV.
• There is a specific problem with the Shield when using the mpv backend and frame rate matching playback. I don't think this issue is impacting any other devices (at least not as severely). The dev has made progress in it, but it's a thing that happens. The recommended ExoPlayer backend playback is not impacted,
• The Fire Stick is essentially a dead platform. All future Fire Sticks will be the VegaOS platform. NVIDIA still makes and sells the Shield Pro, even releasing software updates for it, despite its advanced age as a hardware platform. And it will continue to be viable on the Google Play platform for the foreseeable future. It's unknown if/when Amazon might pull the plug on its app store support for Fire Sticks (they might even reverse course if they lose too much market share to ONN's devices, which is what all the tech YouTubers are recommending now). They do seem to be continuing with FireOS on actual TV sets at least.

Personally, I want a new Shield with at least another gigabyte of RAM and more video codec support. Adopting the current SoC from the Nintendo Switch 2 (which NVIDIA makes), and adding 3-5 GB of RAM would boost the device highly in its other function as a living room Android gaming device.

[Joloxx9]

Thanks I am thinking about at least trying shield over the Apple TTV, If Plezy is better on it than native client then I will give it a go

[nx6]

The Apple TV has interested me for some time because of the raw horsepower its A-series CPU brings to the table and the (relatively) ad-free home screen. But the shenanigans with the "Fake DV" in the official Plex app and missing HD audio format support in a device with that high a price turns me off of it. My Shield had an ad-free home screen as well... back when I bought it. The Fire Stick is really the better client for me because of the content I normally watch, but the extra resources in the Shield can be felt in the responsiveness, and I really dislike how much more ad-heavy the interface in FireOS is. If I could put regular Android TV on the stick I would.

[Joloxx9]

Can't you just install launcher that looks like appletv on the shield and have adored experience ? Also I guess you can easily debloat it with few commands?

Raw power means nothing in aplletv when something constantly doesn't work, I've vever used plex on iit, just Infuse because it was superior but infuse got a lot of issues with plex, and they do not add requested featuers for years. Hence I would like to buy and test shield, with official client and plezy, I guess both support sake formats like profile 7 MEL?

[nx6]

High general computing performance can be used to overcome a lack of specialized ability. Apple TVs do not have AV1 decoding hardware. AV1 playback works on an Apple TV in Infuse because the Apple TV's processor is powerful enough to decode AV1 in software on it. The current public Official Plex app doesn't have that. Higher performance also means you don't have to use a highly-optimized playback pipeline to get required performance from a device. You can use a less-efficient method that might have other benefits (like choosing mpv vs ExoPlayer).

If i I was entirely focused on performance I'd likely get a Ugoos or Dune HD or some other third-party box. The issue with those is they are not Google-certified Android TV devices, and wont support many commercial streaming services at their full quality because of it. I'm not interested in modding my streaming device OS and fussing over multiple CoreELEC fork builds.

Very little of the content I watch is HDR, let alone Dolby Vision. But I like to have the option on the one TV I have in the house that is Dolby Vision/Dolby Atmos compatible.

[edde746]

If you want the widest support for codecs, DV, etc, something S905X4-K/J based might be your best option from what I can tell. I would not focus specifically on Plezy support when picking something to buy.