The lack of hardware support for a few modern codecs is a pretty big complaint from me, but nothing else out there is decent :/
It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it.
That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead you boot to CoreELEC from an SD card and use Kodi.
I'm constantly surprised how many people are in that narrow category of just dipping thier toe in the water for "self-hosted" content that it's little enough it fits on disk storage you can have in your living room (mine is a half-height server rack in the basement), but also have progressed past thr point of using any streaming services. I guess there are a lot of people without families that also never travel out there.
If my entire world was plex, I probably would have kept it as my main device, but I really like a lot of the android streaming apps i use and the experience in kodi land just isn't as good when it exists.
This is not true. Streaming from a NAS at high speeds is fully supported and works fine. I would suggest to use NFS over SMB though, SMB gives me issues for higher bitrate content
Streaming apps do indeed not work. It's a device for local / NAS media playback.
I actually wish we could run android in a container on the CoreELEC side and switch back and forth between Kodi and the android UI/apps (without needing a reboot, and having a better managed android environment than the provided one).
Each of these Android set top boxes need to be certified to get high quality playback.
This is the only reason I know about this Ugoos device. I find it so strange that Profile 7 is effectively unsupported outside of Blu-ray players and this one device. It doesn't even seem like it can be a processing power issue because the documentation says that the other profiles have higher maximum pixel rates.
I don't have the Ugoos box myself though. Instead I'm running a series of processing steps on my Blu-ray rips which converts the file to Profile 8. For every movie I've tried so far this has been fine, though I've read that some movies lean far too heavily on the FEL and have color problems without it.
Since DV Profile 7 is only used for Blu-Ray discs, and playing backed up BR copies from a non BR player is not really supported, it kind if makes sense that it's not supported.
For the Ugoos device, I'm not sure, but I thought the chipset inside supports it, but you still need to flash custom firmware (CoreELEC) and provide a Dolby Vision file to unlock this. So it's not supported out of the box.
You can play HDR10+ 4K on Apple TV using Infuse[0] (and whatever DLNA server you want to stand up with your content.)
[0] Since 2017, apparently.
It sounds like it's gotten better by a lot, but I'm curious whether you've had to pay for each newer version if Infuse. They were doing a "for life" purchase before, but that just meant the one major version number, and they were releasing new and EOL old major versions every 1.5-2 years at the time. It seemed like they were heading own the path of a monthly subscription payment model at the time
Being annual and pretty cheap I really don't mind throwing them some money to continue development, it's worth it to me for the experience. I can't tell from the website but I feel like there's a monthly option if ya just want to test the waters.
1) They close or lock down hidden features that people find to make it better, it's not user friendly.
2) ADs, they should give them away with how much advertising they bundle with it.