
Takes a lot longer to buffer and not as rock solid as direct play / direct stream.īut overall, I'm shocked, amazed, and thrilled. It CAN do it, but it's not super thrilled about it. If there's an Achilles heel for PMS on Shield, it's transcoding video. I've also had a buddy hitting it from his house with multiple remote streams and it still just hums happily along. The Shield happily mounted my network share via SMB and Plex saw it immediately.

And it sings with hard-wired connections - I can stream 4K material to my Apple TV all day long, no sweat.Įven getting it connected to my NAS was simple and easy. I managed to get three 4K and two HD streams running before it started stuttering. I would have done more, but I had run out of devices!įor 4K, if you've got the bandwidth it's still quite capable. I had SEVEN local direct play / direct stream HD streams going to test it out and the Shield didn't seem to be breaking a sweat. It eats HD streams for breakfast and I haven't found the upper limit of what it's capable of. Really surprised at all of the hate (or at least dismissiveness) I've seen for this solution as the Shield has turned out to be an amazingly capable little Plex server.įor HD, it's almost unbelievable. I'd been looking for a good way to take the strain off my iMac (daily driver) that has been my Plex server for years and, despite some of the arguments I'd heard against the Shield running PMS I thought I'd give it a shot. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of dropping $200 on another streaming box so decided to see how it worked as a Plex server as well to better justify the expense. Picked up an Nvidia Shield Pro last week to be able to pass TrueHD/Atmos from my Plex library to my Sonos Arc system (since Plex on Apple TV won't / can't). Tl dr: For anyone who's looking for a capable, dedicated Plex server solution, the Nvidia Shield is well worth considering. Overall, I'm still incredibly impressed and would still absolutely recommend to anyone looking for an easy to use and deploy Plex Server. I've even got it running Live TV & DVR using an HDHomeRun tuner. Had one glitch with a corrupted database (see below - no issues since putting it on a UPS), and had one issue with paused playback that a quick reboot of the Shield fixed, but otherwise all has been great both for me and for friends who have access to it. Plex has been running at least as reliably on the Shield as it had been on the iMac and having it on a dedicated box has been really nice. I've turned off the old Plex server that had been running on my iMac and the Shield Pro is now our full time Plex Server.

UPDATE: Two months in and I'm still extremely pleased.
