A few days back, Best Buy offered the Nvidia Shield for $139 as it’s “Deal of the Day”, I immediately snagged one. I have not opened it yet, it’s in the box unwrapped, in a closet. I may use this personally, or may use it as a gift somewhere later in the year.
My question to Shield owners (and others): Is the Tablo experience through the Shield Engine equal-to, less-than, better, worse, more troublesome or the same as for dedicated Tablo box owners? Are there any Shield Engine owners who have had fewer (or more) challenges with routine configs, etc.?
What is the price of the tuner you have to buy for the Shield?
With the Tablo DUAL Lite at its current price, might be cheaper to buy it as a whole home solution. The ENGINE doesn’t let other devices connect to it for viewing.
$70.00 for the Tuner, which I have not (yet) bought. Add that to my $139 for the Shield and I’m into it for $210. Still haven’t opened it up, might end up being a gift for somebody, this Christmas season. Might be going past the point of diminishing returns on this.
I had a Shield TV with a Hauppauge WinTV tuner. It was clunky to say the least. I don’t know if it was the Shield (which I had overall issues with) or the Tablo software, but it wasn’t nearly as good an experience as I’ve had with the Tablo Dual Lite. BTW, I tried the tuner with the Plex DVR software as well. Again, I can’t say if it was the Shield or the Plex software, but that sucked even worse.
Oh, and remember, if you go the Tablo/Shield TV route, you will need to dedicate a USB drive to the Tablo. No mixing of any Shield related files on it.
I’ve had sterling results with the Dual Lite as well, and (like you) not particularly enamored of Plex, where Tablo is concerned. I set up a Plex server, as part of my HD Homerun experiment, and began to learn anew how to work with it (it had been years since I first tried it).
After all the great things I’ve heard & read about the venerable Shield, I’ll probably pass on this and stick with what I know (and what’s proven to work).
Yeah, a lot of people sing the praises of Shield TV. I’m not one of them. I had remote control issues, multiple updates that didn’t go particularly well, and found out the hard way that external storage doesn’t mean ‘external’ to Plex (all metadata MUST stay internal and I had the 16GB model). At least it didn’t used to allow for external… they supposedly fixed that, but it never worked for me. I didn’t want to give up and tried for over a year to work with and like the Shield. It never happened for me so I sold it. Shortly after, I Ebayed my Tivo and got Tablo. For the foreseeable future, I’m with Tablo and very happy so far.
Just to provide info from another angle, the enhancement they pushed out to move Plex metadata to the external storage DID work for me and I have encountered no issues with it.
It seems as though the Shield Engine gets less attention and fewer updates on the Tablo side, so in that respect I’m satisfied (and thankful) for my Dual Lite. Tablo aside, I’m excited about the idea of being able to use the Shield as a Plex Server.
Having checked & researched several online forums, I get a mixed bag of “great” and “terrible”, with very little in between. As a novice in this arena, I’m not able to discern whether either (or both?) are correct. But the idea is exciting to me.