Specifically I’m wondering about the TV frontend UI. Presumably most people are going to be using an android tv box like fire tv or chromecast? Something else?
I recently picked up a new chromecast 4k that has the “Google TV” OS on it and… I’m having a hell of a time coming up with a UI that looks similar to the stock one (with movie recommendations, up next, my watchlist, etc) but that hooks into piracy streaming services.
For launchers I found projectivy, but I noticed that the “channels” feature which pulls in that sort of thing is remarkably limited. Streaming-wise I’ve got stremio and cloudstream, and only stremio lets me pull in my library into projectivy. Which is okay but I can’t get that synced with trakt or getting recommendations; it all has to be managed from stremio.
whereas cloudstream doesn’t really have any connectivity at all. There’s a few streaming services that somewhat pull things in but it’s not great. Netflix doesn’t seem to hook into it, nor plex. It ends up being better to just use the stock home and manually launching into stremio/cloudstream when I want them.
Surely there has to be a better way to do this? The stock home screen is nice with free live tv, movie recommendations that link into various paid streaming services, etc. I’d just like to hook in something like stremio, plex, etc. instead, but that seems impossible?
What exactly do y’all do for your setups? Trying to manage my google play watchlist/likes independently of trackt, and then also managing my stremio library separately from both just feels like hell. I end up having to take mental note of the stuff I see on the home screen and manually searching it up.
The live tv channels that the stock homescreen has is seemingly not replicated anywhere else which is a bit disappointing. I saw the old android tv menu get really close to what I’m after, but I can’t manage to get it working on my newer chromecast. The menu installs, but the channel feature doesn’t work, making it pointless.
Is there a better way?
Shield Pro on the TVs, but they’re starting to show their age. If no one puts a powerful chip into a new Android box in the next year or so, I’ll probably move to AppleTV units. I wish there was an alternative, but nothing else has the horsepower that they do.
I have super high hopes we’ll see a 3rd gen Shield TV around the time of the new Switch launch. IIRC, the og Shields and Switch share the same Nvidia Chips.
I really hope so. We’ve been extremely happy with ours. And, IIRC you’re right. I think the Switch has a slightly newer revision, but it’s almost entirely the same chip.
It’s a shame that AppleTV doesnt support TrueHD atmos. That seems to be the one feature that the Shield stands apart on, although the new model Firestick now support it, too.
I tried Kodi on Firestick 4K and the whole experience is super clunky compared to the AppleTV.
Show their age how? My 2015 pro is still awesome on GF Experience v8.x with GFN, Kodi and SmartTube. Installed an SSD a few years back and breathed new life into it.
The chip struggles at higher bitrate files particularly when there is a more complex audio codec and HDR video. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed, it’s an extremely common complaint from owners online.
Maybe because I only bother with 1080 for the past year, but I used to regularly watch my 30GB 4k 10-bit files with no trouble, even streamed from my NAS.