Yahoo DVD Player -> Western Digital Live -> Nvidia Shield TV
When I grew up, we had VHS and Beta video rentals and porn was conveninetly accessible by slowly moving the dial knob between UHF channels. Oh those were the days indeed.
Then DVD's arrived later on, nobody I knew ever used Laserdics (but the picture quality was great).
In the early 2000's I purchased this piece of crap DVD player called "Yahoo! DVD Player" which looked alien with analog gauges and menus. It supported a wide variety of formats and even had media access card reader on front of it. Unfortuanately, this piece of crap DVD player literally died and stop spinning up DVD's after about a year of use. I would burn (il)legal copies of my DVD library in order to have backups. Yes, it was a complete piece of crap.
Fast forward about a year or two and my buddies Stalker and Cameraman were using these new devies called "WDTV". Basically, you could stream almost any format from a local computer hard drive or network share, and even use a PLEX server to view videos from your collection. Good times.
Video playback on the WDTV is excellent. You could also load up a custom rom, and I did that once but had to revert back when I started having issues with decoding some videos. It has never failed me ever.
But even the WDTV device is showing it's age. It hasn't been updated via firmware in years but still played solid 1080p videos. Unfortunately, it could not handle 4K or even some of the newer video codecs out there.
I decided to give the NVidia Shield a try. Having been burned once before when I bought a cheap chinese Android box off Amazon (never again, piece of crap). I spent a little more money on a device that was basically built for gaming and then streaming. The Shield isn't cheap, but my friend Stalker swears by it and I had to try it out. The performance has been good so far - although I haven't tried 4K video yet, I will likely very soon. My netflix isn't 4K yet but with this device I might consider it.
Its tiny and has so much graphic processing power it can literally stream games from your computer. You could subscribe to NVidia's Game Now service, but I'd suggest avoiding it. There doesn't seem to be many happy users of that service. I tested the voice commands and it is able to pick up most words clearly. It had problems when I spoke certain words, it could have been my heavy Canadian accent. (lol)
Then DVD's arrived later on, nobody I knew ever used Laserdics (but the picture quality was great).
In the early 2000's I purchased this piece of crap DVD player called "Yahoo! DVD Player" which looked alien with analog gauges and menus. It supported a wide variety of formats and even had media access card reader on front of it. Unfortuanately, this piece of crap DVD player literally died and stop spinning up DVD's after about a year of use. I would burn (il)legal copies of my DVD library in order to have backups. Yes, it was a complete piece of crap.
Fast forward about a year or two and my buddies Stalker and Cameraman were using these new devies called "WDTV". Basically, you could stream almost any format from a local computer hard drive or network share, and even use a PLEX server to view videos from your collection. Good times.
Video playback on the WDTV is excellent. You could also load up a custom rom, and I did that once but had to revert back when I started having issues with decoding some videos. It has never failed me ever.
But even the WDTV device is showing it's age. It hasn't been updated via firmware in years but still played solid 1080p videos. Unfortunately, it could not handle 4K or even some of the newer video codecs out there.
I decided to give the NVidia Shield a try. Having been burned once before when I bought a cheap chinese Android box off Amazon (never again, piece of crap). I spent a little more money on a device that was basically built for gaming and then streaming. The Shield isn't cheap, but my friend Stalker swears by it and I had to try it out. The performance has been good so far - although I haven't tried 4K video yet, I will likely very soon. My netflix isn't 4K yet but with this device I might consider it.
Its tiny and has so much graphic processing power it can literally stream games from your computer. You could subscribe to NVidia's Game Now service, but I'd suggest avoiding it. There doesn't seem to be many happy users of that service. I tested the voice commands and it is able to pick up most words clearly. It had problems when I spoke certain words, it could have been my heavy Canadian accent. (lol)
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