So I've been using the Shield for a while now and unfortunately I've not had as much luck as I was hoping.
I soon realised I made a stupid mistake regarding
"No Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos in Prime Video" on the native TV app. It turns out there are only a couple of titles in Dolby Vision on Prime Video, Jack Ryan being one of them but
only season 1. I had been looking at season 2
So Dolby Vision was already working on the native app. Unfortunately 95% of the HDR titles on Prime Video are HDR10+... And the Shield doesn't support HDR10+... If I had known this before, I probably wouldn't have bought the Shield. But that's my fault for not checking. This means I'll have to keep using the native app for Prime Video. As for Dolby Atmos... I'm not sure. I'm not seeing it mentioned anywhere in the UI on the native app or the shield; I'm only seeing 5.1.
Also annoyingly, there's no Play Next channel on the Shield either, so I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding that too. Nor Prime Video channel...
Also, one of my reasons was for brighter, better looking subtitles. Unfortunately this has been the worst experience. They are indeed white now instead of grey (dare I say actually too bright now? lol), but the moment I saw them on Netflix I immediately noticed they looked aliased/blurry compared to the native app, which is super sharp. I'm not sure what the cause of this is, as Nvidia and Netflix don't understand why. I suspect either Netflix are rendering them at a lower resolution, or the TV's picture processing is affecting them now they are part of the video itself (via HDMI instead of being rendered on a separate layer that the TV is aware of in the native apps). My example photos (make sure to view at 100%):
I wonder what subtitles look like in Netflix on something like Apple TV compared to the native app? If anyone could confirm, that'd be appreciated!
Unfortunately I've also had no luck with 10-bit. No matter what I try to watch, the 'device info' seems to state 8-bit, whether it's Dolby Vision on Netflix or HDR on Prime Video. Even some specific 10-bit content I tried via Plex is also saying 8-bit
I'll have to try Kodi when I get it set up.
One good thing I can say though is the picture quality of Dolby Vision content definitely seems to look much better than the FS4K! I haven't checked side-by-side with photos, but I'm not unhappy with the picture, which is good at least. I might check for certain with my camera later.
I also like that I can have a proper screen saver now (
Aerial Dream, which basically replicates Apple TV's, is really nice!). And all the buttons being bluetooth on the remote is really nice as well (even volume, because it works via HDMI-CEC!).
It's also really nice that the Shield can be configured to turn on and off with the TV, regardless of which you turn on first. This is especially useful as I have set the Shield to sleep after an hour of inactivity, which means it turns the TV off also. (I did have to turn off the 'Switch off timer' in Eco settings of the TV by setting it to 0 to prevent it turning itself off if I hadn't touched its remote in hours.)
The AI upscaler for HD content also works surprisingly well. I can see a big difference with it on vs off.
So overall... A little benefit but also with some drawbacks. I'm not totally convinced I'll keep the Shield yet... Unless I can find some extra uses for it beyond just replacing the TV content.
When it comes to Dolby Vision the colours are all wrong. I have no movie rips but used a test file with a very red rose with clear water drops. (Art of Essence (Dolby Vision).mp4)
The internal player plays it right but over HDMI the rose is pale pink with greenish water drops. The picture is still good though so before I watched it on internal player(from usb) I thought it was an artistic presentation of a rose in green waterdrops.
The green/pink thing is on on every DV test file I have tried (and then it is not looking artistic at all just wrong)
That sounds strange! You're probably already aware, but have you definitely checked your picture settings? I ask because they are specific to each device
and output type. Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+, HD, etc. all have different settings you need to configure. I noticed the default Dolby Vision profile looked terrible to me.