This. Just buy an NVidia shield and use your TV as a monitor. The UI and the fact that it uses AndroidTV and not some shitty Samsung OS is reason alone to buy it. Also my Samsung TV gets a start signal from my NVidida Shield so I do not even have to bother with using 2 remotes :)
That's exactly what I've been doing with my 2019 Samsung TV and and a Shield Pro. The TV is unplugged from the internet and all my streaming is done from the Shield, which is even better because:
1. The Netflix/Prime Video etc apps are snappier because of the beefier SoC
2. Content looks better, because DLSS does a better job at upscaling than the TV's native upscaler
3. I can use it to stream games from my PC, which is making me reconsider buying one of the new consoles just for couch gaming since I could spend the money on a new GPU to upgrade my rig an just stream from there.
And as you mentioned, the presence of HDMI CEC makes remotes rather interchangeable
I also didn't connect the antenna cable and didn't even notice during the entirety of the (Italian) lockdown since I never watch "normal" TV. At this point I wish it could be possible to get TVs without a tuner, I could stop paying the TV taxes!
I have an extremely similar setup as you, however I will note that the quality of android TV apps seems to be rather lacking. Specifically Spotify will randomly disconnect from my phone and stop and Prime Video cannot play UHD video properly (displaying a warning saying to update the app when I’m on the latest version). These are two apps I tend to use frequently on other devices so it’s super annoying that they don’t work. Of course I can use my Samsung TVs built in apps but that defeats the purpose of owning the shield.
While I’m at it I may as well complain about the google assistant support using my home mini. While nvidia advertises this as a feature, it often works much worse than it did on my cheap old chromecast so that’s quite disappointing. For example, the shield will launch the Netflix overview for a show when asked to play it but won’t actually start the show until you wait for the auto preview to start or you explicitly ask it to press play.
Overall, I guess I’m just not as thrilled with this device as everyone else seems to be. I kind of wish I had just gone with the Apple TV at this point so that I could ditch airplay on my TV which is the only reason I have it connected to the internet at all.
Have you streamed yet or it’s just an option right now? Something I’m considering but I’ve not looked into. Wondering about lag, and if I have to run upstairs to my pc to start games etc.
Tried just once (the whole setup is rather new). I tried the first part of Hellblade running on my PC, which is in the same room, at 1440p & High settings. I played for about half an hour, with no noticeable glitches or lag. Both the PC and the Shield are connected using cables (each to a different switch, both switches go directly to the router).
I hope I have time to try it more before the weekend, but the results are promising.
Oh, I thought it was obvious since we're talking about a Shield Pro but now I think it's worth mentioning that my PC has a Nvidia card (an RTX2060), so I'm using nvidia's native streaming support. It's also worth noting that an OSS client exists (Moonlight), so the Shield could be replaced by, say, a Raspberry Pi 4
Interesting, thanks for the reply. I’ll research for sure.
With the PS5 controller having a microphone array built in, I won’t be purchasing, which makes me sad as I’ve been gaming since the ZX Spectrum. Also Sony injecting their ads into the PS4 home-screen which will no doubt carry over to the PS5. Gah. But on a positive note, those new AMD offerings...
Can only speak for Steam's streaming here, but your mileage will probably vary. Your system needs to be fairly beefy (you will get a bit of a performance hit from streaming games). I run a geforce 1060 and it'll stream any new games at 1080p / 60fps but I'd go beefier for 2K/4K streaming. I'm still on a dumb 1080p TV so that'll be more important if your TV is >1080p.
Biggest obstacle here was the wifi in this house is unreliable. We tried getting a wifi extender and even a new wireless router but we kept getting latency issues. We opted to get a powerline adapter for a stable connection. MOCA is also worth looking into if connectivity is a problem.
And finally, running to the other room to start games. Again, this is steam, but I'm guessing shield has the same limitation: if your system isn't logged in or the screen is locked, you will probably have problems starting games remotely in those cases. You'll want to setup remote desktop almost for sure (you can VNC or there's a way to logout of RDP too without locking the screen automatically). I also have a Wake on LAN shortcut setup to wake the PC up remotely.
Finally, sometimes games won't pipe audio remotely because they don't switch to the "virtual streaming audio device" these apps use properly. As far as I can tell this is on a game-by-game basis and depends how they coded it, but for that I have a pretty ridiculous work around (I remotely start a command line tool via openssh to force the audio device to "steam streaming speakers" then restart the game after that). The games with these problems seem pretty rare though, I'd say maybe 5% of the games I've tried.
Overall it's awesome and I glad I spent a day or two figuring it out. I don't get noticeable lag and I can stream pretty much any game to my living room on the TV now. Also got a "Couchmaster" for a kb/mouse setup. I can also emulate things like Wii U games and stream them remotely to the TV like having an actual system.
You can launch the games directly from the Shield if they appear in GeForce Now on your PC. They usually show up automatically, the only issue being UWP games (like Hellblade I mentioned early), the workaround there is to create a normal shortcut to the game and add that to GeForce, manually.
I use an Nvidia Shield with a GTX 1080 graphics card. The PC is wired to the router through a switch, the Shield is on 5GHz wifi, I use a wired controller. My router is an Archer C7. I feel like there's a slight but noticeable input lag when playing on TV and my framerates are a bit worse. For most games it's ok but for twitchy games, say, Furi or Dark Souls, it's annoying.
The Shield network troubleshooter tells me I have 1ms latency even on wifi but still, maybe it would be better wired. I have no easy way to run an ethernet cable to the TV.
Update: turns out Gamestream forces the resolution to 1080p, I'm looking into ways to try 1440p or even 2160p.
It's still the best gaming-on-TV experience out of the stuff I have in my TV cabinet (PS4 Pro and Xbox One).
It's not an higher resolution, but render quality is way better and it has a much more stable framerate. Too bad it's noisier than even the ps4 :D
