Hi all, hope this post isn’t taken the wrong way - I love my Vero 4k plus and also my 2017 Nvidia Shield. I use the Vero for rips and live TV and the Shield for Netflix, Prime, Youtube. The 2019 version of the Shield now supports Dolby Vision and frame rate matching, two features that I always thought were missing. I understand that the Vero is a different ethos (debian vs android and amazing support vs none) but has the 4k+'s raison d’etre been reduced now? I know that the Shield 2019 has had some teething issues (particularly the tube version with only 2GB ram) but once these have been resolved could the new Shield could be a one-box solution (except Apple TV because there is no app)?
Interested in people’s thoughts.
Kevin
OSMC (and thus the Vero line) is designed to do one thing very well: run Kodi. The Vero has hardware and software support from the same person.
The Shield is like any other Android device…you have to get hardware support and OS updates from the manufacturer, and hope that any apps you use (like Kodi) run OK on whatever version of Android you have. Otherwise, you have to get support for individual apps from each author.
Being Linux-based, you can do many things on OSMC that improve the Kodi experience (OS-level mounts, etc.) that simply cannot be done on Android.
Last, there is value…you can buy a Vero 4K+ and a FireTV 4K for less than the Shield Pro. Yeah, it’s two devices, but the Vero can fill all your local media requirements, while the FireTV handles all the streaming services.
I’ve heard the new Shield messes up the colour palette when playing something in Dolby Vision. The 2017 Shield was the worst AV purchase I’ve ever made by a large margin - an absolute trainwreck of a device - so I see no reason to assume anything good about the new version.
Interesting… my shield has performed flawlessly except the frame rate switching gives a bit of judder on some netflix material. Yes, I also saw that colour palette thing - gives everything a slight red tint. Hopefully something they can solve.