If you want to stream uncompressed 4K UHD movies off a hard drive, you will need some serious hardware and Nvidia delivers the goods with their SHIELD TV Pro.
Any other streamer I tried to play an uncompressed rip right off a 4K disk using MKVMaker stuttered, shook or flat out crashed. I tried a WB Elements portable hard drive plugged into a Roku Ultra via USB and the drive plugged in to my Panasonic DP-UB820-K 4K player — both failed.
Let’s face it, 4K files are enormous and it takes a lot of processing power to play massive audio and visual files. Unless you want to hook up a computer in your home theater room, just get the Shield Pro.
Even at it’s age – it was released in 2019 – the Shield Pro has the muscle needed to stream these large files, in my case over an Ethernet cable and my NAS with Jellyfin as the media server.
And the Shield Pro has a real gigabit Ethernet port, unlike the Roku Ultra which I found to stream much slower via hardwired than through WIFI.
This $200 streamer blows any $50 streamer away and the stripped down remote feels luxurious.
If you want to keep replacing your cheap streaming boxes or sticks every Black Friday, go ahead but the rest of us will jump to the future and buy the one streamer that seems to have done everything right — like actually put in enough RAM and processing power to play 4K rips.
- NVIDIA® Tegra® X1+ processor with a 256-core GPU and 3 GB RAM
- 4K HDR Ready
- Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10
- AI-enhanced upscaling for up to 4K 60 FPS
- Up to 4K HDR playback at 60 FPS (H.265/HEVC)
- Up to 4K playback at 60 FPS (VP8, VP9, H.264, MPEG1/2)
- Up to 1080p playback at 60 FPS (H.263, MJPEG, MPEG4, WMV9/VC1)
- Format/Container support: Xvid/ DivX/ASF/AVI/MKV/MOV/M2TS/MPEG-TS/MP4/WEB-M
- Dolby Audio (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Atmos)
- DTS-X surround sound (pass-through) over HDMI
- High-resolution audio playback up to 24-bit/192 kHz over HDMI and USB
- High-resolution audio up-sample to 24-bit/192 kHz over USB
- Audio support: AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, WAVE, AMR, OGG Vorbis, FLAC, PCM, WMA, WMA-Pro, WMA-Lossless, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Atmos, Dolby TrueHD (pass-through), DTS-X (pass-through), and DTS-HD (pass-through)
- 16 GB*
- *Portion of storage occupied by system software
- Expandable using USB flash or hard drives.
- 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth 5.0 + LE
- Captive Portal support
- Gigabit Ethernet
- HDMI 2.0b with HDCP 2.2 and CEC support
- Two USB 3.0 Ports (Type A)
