cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/38938821
The real difference:
I got an ad like the a month ago, made me start looking at alternatives. I haven’t found one besides Apple TV that supports all the streaming services, is made for a TV, and doesn’t have worse ads. I could handle content ads for streaming services I didn’t have, but just straight TV commercials on my hopepage? Get fucked Google.
We have an Android TV stick that show posters of films available for purchase below applications and that’s the only ad. The stick also somehow blocks Google banner ads on all apps. The catch’s bad responsiveness and unstable comnectivity. And no OS updates for over a year. https://www.mi.com/global/product/mi-tv-stick/specs
The Nvidia Shield is already the rival for the Apple TV.
If only Apple added support for bitstreaming I’d replace my Shield with an AppleTV in a heartbeat.
Don’t get me wrong, the Shield plays everything you throw at it. The hardware is great but the software is so janky. It’s often slow to respond to input, it needs a reboot every couple of days because it just gets more laggy and choppy over time. Sometimes it just forgets my TV supports Dolby Vision until I reboot it. Support from Nvidia seems to have dried up as well.
Just posted about ATV switch from shield myself. I agree with you, the bitstream issue is noticeable on my atmos setup for sure, but all and all I got so fed up with the exact issues you described that I threw in the towel and switched. Overall I think it’s worth it. With some adjustments in my sub crossover I’ve compensated for sound issues a little. I held out because there were all these rumors about Apple finally releasing a new appletv, but now looks unlikely to happen. You have shield or pro? I had both and at first I really didn’t find a whole lot of difference in performance, but for some reason with time the shield tube really started having far more issues than the pro.
I have the 2018 pro. The problem with lack of bitstreaming is that no matter what you adjust, you won’t get 3D audio (i.e. height speakers) out of the LPCM streams. You can do DD+Atmos on streaming services but you miss out on TrueHD+Atmos and DTS:X on bluray backups. That’s not something I want to give up.
“That CPU bump probably means this thing still falls short of the Nvidia Shield TV and Apple TV 4k” Which is just pathetic. I left my Shield for the apple TV. The processor performance is just better on ATV. It’s so much more pleasant to have snappy response times in these devices. Slower than shield sounds awful to me. I also noticed better speed test times on my ethernet ATV than my shieldpro ethernet.
I’m probably a minority in this (although probably not so much here on Lemmy), but if anything, I’d want my TV to be less smart, and less personalised. I don’t want Google to know what my favourite TV shows and movies are. I don’t want “suggestions” on which streaming platforms I could also install (often before the content I would actually want to see). And I most definitely don’t want my TV to be monitoring the rest of my “smart” home.
For the people who are part of this articles titular “we”, I seriously wonder: why would you have been waiting for this?
I think you’re definitely in the majority on lemmy with this take but i agree.
I have a “smart tv” that has never even seen WiFi because i prefer having control over my hardware. My media pc is all i need. I even got a little remote for an air mouse and keyboard combo that works just fine for me.
No thanks I’ll stick with my Apple TV
Go away, Google.
