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Ironically, I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there. Of course, Apple is both the manufacturer and a streamer in their own right. And they definitely privilege their own store and streaming over other services. However, everything else already sucks so much with UIs chock full of ads that Apple wins anyway. It’s awful.

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> I think the Apple TV is the best streaming box out there

It definitely is.

IMO the only advantage of the Nvidia Shield is better HDMI audio passthrough but it has so many other issues. And with more recent versions of the Plex client for tvOS the lack of audio passthrough is much less of an issue than it used to be (PCM conversion used to introduce sync issues). Also the Plex app for Android TV has been getting consistently worse over the years for me. Plus all the ads Android TV added a couple of years ago. Ugh.

Some of the more exotic boxes out there to run CoreELEC have tehcnically better DV support. These might work if you only want a Plex or Kodi client but for general streaming the Apple TV is just better.

Honestly can't wait for Apple to release a new one. Hopefully with audio passthrough of more codecs.

what are the shield issues? I've had 2 of them for 10 years and I haven't noticed anything.

For years it had frame rate issues. Every second or so when watching eg Netflix you would see a micro stutter if the content wasn't at 24fps (eg PAL content at 25fps). I think this was improved recently but it's been years since I've used the Shield for anything but Plex.

As for Plex I've had way too many issues to list. Networking issues, having to restart the Plex app after the device went to sleep, etc. When I switched to using Plex on the Apple TV all the issues went away.

It should be noted that I have re-pasted and cleaned the dust of my Shield a couple of times since I got it 10 years ago.

> since I got it 10 years ago

Probably one of the big issues here. It's probably still the best Android TV you can get today but that's really sad because the SoC in it came out in 2015 (with some improvements in 2019). It was probably worse than what was in Apple TV at the time and Apple refreshed it two times since then.

I held off on buying it for many years because of the chorus of people saying, "Once the Switch 2 comes out, we'll get a new one!" (the line of thinking being that the Nvidia Shield used the same custom SoC as the Switch 1).

Switch 2 is out, no new Shield in sight. And the Shield TV Pro is still $200...

I doubt it. That SOC is still overkill for video (which I believe powered the Nintendo Switch 1). I think the big issue is really a combination of the Nvidia software and just terrible Android TV.

That's what I was getting at. New software tends to run poorly on old hardware.

I’ve had one for maybe 4 and mine has always been pretty buggy and unreliable. Restarts aren’t uncommon.

fwiw, I've had mine about that long and haven't had any restarts but for software upgrades.

A few reasons I'm staying positive towards Apple, despite being a streamer themselves, is that they're not large at all. They've currently remained a small, niche content provider of reasonably high-quality content. They don't seem to have the aspirations to be bigger than those on their platform. Also, they have so much increasing oversight on their App Store and decisions there, that they likely do not want to do anything that shows a preference and gains the ire of governing agencies. I'm hoping this keep them relatively neutral.

Despite becoming quite critical of Apple in many other areas, I agree with your assessment here. And hopefully they realize if they started getting so anticompetitive in this space that they start elbowing "non-Apple" streamers out of the picture on their platform, the loss would be Apple's. A streaming box that doesn't have Netflix, or that is missing another major, would be far less compelling than what it is today.

Their half-baked attempt to mix the "Apple TV" app with the entire Apple TV interface is irritating.

As is their lack of UI discipline.

I own Star Trek: TNG purchased on Apple TV.

The UX for watching an episode is scrolling through a list of the 178 episodes. That's it. That's the only experience. One list, 178 episodes in order.

This is pretty appalling from the company that used to have such a design reputation. One day of effort of one engineer could make it so much better.

This is a pretty fair comment. Their lack of ambition also has this downside. I've felt they are increasingly de-prioritizing the old iTunes business to focus on Apple TV+, which sucks because we really need a good counterbalance to Prime.

I put the Projectivy home screen on my various Android/Google TV devices, which is clean and ad-free.

A couple of older devices it "just works" on. A newer TV with Android built in requires minor adb commands to disable the return of the default home screen, but it's been working for ~6 months, including a TV software update (which my wife initiated and I was worried might turn things to their default status, but didn't).

Apple TV will be my next device if the above becomes locked out.

Can confirm Apple is best but Roku is amazingly good number 2. In some ways its UX beats Apple.

Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in. I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.

With Roku built in as well as whatever ad pipeline(s) the TV manufacturer wants. These days my AppleTV is allowed to talk to the internet. My television is not.

I have a Samsung TV that I intentionally didn’t connect to the Internet for that reason. I occasionally get an annoying pop-up randomly, encouraging me to connect it to Wi-Fi.

Eh those TVs are a dubious value proposition. I grabbed one and wound up returning it because it won't even let you use the TV as a damned TV without connecting it to the internet and creating a roku account so they can track you.

My Roku TV (that hasn't been turned on in years, but was left plugged in for years...) literally tries to reach out every minute to home servers. Before u plugging it, I had blocked it's DNS, and was blown away at how frequently it tries to phone home. Easily the noisiest device on my home network.

> I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.

Sure I guess. But those devices objectively suck. the CPU and storage in "smart TVs" are so underpowered that using streaming apps on them is painfully sluggish.

For comparison, I've used the "Chromecast with Google TV" (a $50ish at its release 4k streaming stick that uses the 'Google TV', fka 'Android TV' platform) and a Sony TV on the same platform, released the same year. The Sony UI is a lot more sluggish than the Google stick device. Also tested running an SNES emulator. The Google device can easily do it, the Sony TV can't keep up even on a basic game like Super Mario World.

And then of course, on the other end of the spectrum, the Apple TV exists, which specs-wise can easily play 3D racing games at a fine framerate.

Agreed. I currently have a “Roku TV” that is hooked up to another Roku device, because the one built into it is so slow and outdated as to be almost unusable. The $29 (on sale) Roku stick I hooked up to it works fine. Getting a built-in Roku IMHO is a false economy, the built-in thing will almost certainly go to crap before the TV itself does.

Maybe it is just the devices I have, but I've had the higher end 4K-capable Roku boxes before I eventually got all Roku TVs. I would say the experience with my Roku TVs (TCL, Phillips, and Sharp) has been the best. Nothing slow about them.

I don't try to do anything like run a console emulator on them though. Just watching streaming channels and YouTube TV.

I wish I could come back and ask you how they perform after a couple more years of "software updates" from the app providers. Considering, too, that they will also be vibe-coding them from here on out.

IDK about the specs on yours, but even things like bloated sizes of apps themselves on disk can become a problem. What happens when the OS and the apps inevitably go up in size such that the 8GB or whatever TCL has decided to give you cannot hold the OS, Netflix, Disney+, and HBO at the same time? They don't just let you stay on old versions anymore, either.

I have a 10 year old 4k Roku TV that works a good as new. The Roku app API is severely limited. The upside of that is that it discourages webdev bloat.

Interesting. Honestly I had never considered that angle. Given that they really ought not to need anything but simple navigation of lists and grids to build a streaming app that is actually usable and fast, not whatever the Youtube App (330MB) and Netflix (183MB) are wasting my phone's space on... now I'm wondering if this forced parsimony imposed on the developers could be a reason to give Roku a try again. I admit it's been over a decade since I used a Roku regularly.

Funny, my daughter's Roku TV from TCL got unbearable and was replaced after ten years.

Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.

I believe there are TVs that come with AppleTV built-in. I'm not in the market, so I haven't looked, but I suspect they're not the bargain basement Wal-Mart sets.

There are TVs with Apple TV the streaming service, not Apple TV the OS. (Or Apple TV the app.)

https://dcurt.is/apple-tv-all-the-way-down

(Since that piece, they've renamed Apple TV+ to also be "Apple TV".)

> Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.

Except in that case don't you have to give the TVs themselves Internet access? Do you trust any TV with such access nowadays given all the tomfoolery with surveillance that most OEMs do?

Why is it better than the Google TV (new Chromecast). We’ve bought every iteration of these and had no issues whatsoever with them. I don’t notice advertising unless it’s within Prime streams.

The latest Google TV even has an Ethernet port on it which was a welcome addition. Their approach to the universal remote is also great for simple TV setups even with a soundbar involved s long as you use the ARC hdmi port.

I can’t see any advantages the Apple product has.

I don't like anything Apple, I had an awful experience with MacOS (the laptop was great), iPhones and their 12 finger gestures (again, terrible software) aren't for me.

WiFi and worsening slowness woes with the Google TV/Chromecast pushed me into buying an Apple TV, and it is the single Apple product that I would glowingly recommend; that's saying something coming from an Apple hater. It is truly a fantastic product.

Yep, Apple TV has long been my preferred streaming box. I put one on every TV and don't connect the TV to the network. Plex and YouTube are probably my top apps and while YouTube is maddening (just horrible UI/UX), I find Plex to be mostly enjoyable or at least reliable and unsurprising.

YouTube is probably the single biggest upside that an HTPC has over an Apple TV. (And any other streaming device.)

For anything from youtube I actually care about watching on a TV, I'll download with yt-dlp and put on my Plex server - it's less friction than dealing with youtube on the TV itself.

If the box where I can’t set up a third party player to do the ‘replay last 5 seconds with subtitles on’ because it’s all locked down is the best then I don’t want to know what the worst is, I’ll just keep using LibreElec. At least if LibreElec does something I don’t like Claude can fix it.

What box do you put librelec on?

[Removed bad comment. Sorry.]

Wow entitled gatekeeping much?

What if parent already knows the answers to that and the question they really want to ask is … wait for it… the one they actually asked?

If you want to ask a different question go right ahead but cutting off others like this is plain rude.

A cheap Android TV box. Between lack of proper hardware acceleration for 4K/Dolby Vision decoding and lack of sleep(!) support, I would never recommend that hardware, the ones that are actually recommended by the community are RP5 ($$$) and especially Intel Nx00 (N100 etc.) which are actually the gold standard of mainline(-ish in case of RPi) codec and hardware support.

I use LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4, though it doubtless also works well on a Pi 5 (and the cheapest one with 1 GB of RAM is probably plenty).

It does great with local [networked] media and that's all I use it for. There's a million plugins for other things, some dating back to the XBMC days on the OG Xbox 20+ years ago, that others may find utility in... but for regular commercialized streaming I just use a $25 Chromecast and that does the business well-enough.

(LibreElec has a huge advantage to me that most people probably don't care about: My AV receiver sounds brilliant and was once very expensive [~$4,500], but it's rather old and it chokes on HDMI signals higher than 1080i. It is also unable to decode things like Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, and DTS-HD.

This would make the receiver a non-starter for post-Blu-Ray film soundtracks, except the Pi4 has two HDMI outputs. It is a no-effort built-in for LibreElec to use one of these outputs for video, while the other one is dedicated to high-res multichannel PCM audio.

In this way: The video system gets whatever video signals it wants, while the audio system is just fed PCM audio and doesn't have to struggle with any of that more-modern business at all. Everything is very happy with this arrangement.)

The Apple TV (hardware) can do what you're asking using a voice command "What did he/she say". It's possible it no longer works in every app because services insist on writing their own players that don't work as well as the player provided by Apple TV.

When Subtitles are set to 'auto' i think it now automatically turns the subtitles on like that when you do the skip back command.

But yeah, the Siri way (much as I loathe using Siri) is the definite way.

I know about the feature, I'm just saying it only works in the first party app and you can't make in work in e.g. Infuse. [0]

[0] https://community.firecore.com/t/use-siri-to-enable-disable-...

> it no longer works in every app because services insist on writing their own players that don't work as well as the player provided by Apple TV

So much for those oft-touted benefits of Apple's policy on gatekeeping third-party apps so it allows them to enforce quality standards.

|If the box where I can’t set up a third party player to do the ‘replay last 5 seconds with subtitles on’ because it’s all locked down

You do you, but I find that to be a truly niche thing to throw away an entire platform over. It literally does everything else better imho.

What's the app that has sponsor block and ad removal for YouTube on the Apple TV

NextDNS.

AdGuard and PiHole like solutions do not provide the same benefits as Sponsorblock. They also do not work on Youtube ads.

Unironically, the best streaming box out there is a PC where you can hook up ad block and stream content from independent content providers like Dropout and Nebula using their web-based UI.

We seem to have an economic cycle of enshittification => piracy => people realizing they've over enshittified => goto 10. We were in phase 3 a few years ago, now we're in phase 1 and it's an insane race to the bottom.

I certainly wouldn't mind being able to block ads on the Apple TV for certain services (by which I mean YouTube), but for services which aren't as aggressively terrible as ad-supported YouTube is, I'm generally fine just making the choice between paying a higher price to go ad-free or putting up with ads. I know some folks are absolutely against all ads no matter what no exceptions, but I'm okay with the notion of "you pay for this by watching ads" if they don't abuse their end of the bargain (by which I mean YouTube).

Also, I watch Nebula on my Apple TV pretty frequently, and Dropout's available there, too.

Yeah, I am not dead set against advertising in all its forms[1] but I think the balance of advertising and experience quality to price has swung way out of alignment. There are numerous streaming platforms that all price by subscription to take a small chip out of your luxury cash. For most households one or two platforms (which would probably be somewhere near 25 USD) is the reasonable budget and the costs just don't make sense for the quality of content (and the fact that you still get ads in a lot of cases). I support ad-subsidized content for wide accessibility, but the greed has gotten out of hand and the product, if you do pay through the nose, doesn't match that price point.

1. Personally, I find it incredibly disruptive but I had ADHD so it tends to break my immersion in the media but I understand that I'm an edge case and I'll always need a more complex solution.

The desktop is the best streaming box only if:

- You run Windows because nothing else will let you stream in 4k

- You ignore the absolutely sub-par UI/UX couch experience

And I say this as someone who's been running a media center pc in various forms for decades.

I use a projector as an output device (though there are plenty of TVs (just maybe not the newest ones) that still will take an input cable and blindly pass through the contents) as well as having a little wireless mini-keyboard the size of a remote with a touchpad on it and a wireless any-surface mouse that I use to control it from the couch. I genuinely don't think most people would find that interaction disagreeable and it provides a very familiar UX that you can even trivially replace or get multiple of since it's literally just a mini wireless keyboard and mouse which cost you all of maybe 30 USD.

I will conceded that windows is a real advantage though since enshittification has driven other environment applications to become rare or unmaintained. Though I haven't invested real time into seeing what options might be available as unified platform solutions in other envs - like maybe the work Valve put into proton allows you to sneak your way into good media support?

Why is that ironic? This is exactly what you should expect, unless you feel very strongly about sideloading apps or installing different operating systems. Or if you love ads.

Some apps on the apple tv still have ads on the pause screen (covering the content I may have wanted to pause to see, a terrible UX choice). It can't be entirely avoided.

It can if you avoid a dedicated device and just hook a desktop up to your TV. It's a one time cost to set up a host you control and that seems to be getting more and more worth it.

Is there a solution for audio and video downscaling when accessing content via the browser in a linux htpc setup?

I don't think any of the big streaming content providers have native apps on linux and no browser can pass through audio bitstreams to HDMI. Video quality is limited as well.

Having a dedicated streaming box is better in this regard

The only issue with Apple TV is they still can't figure out a good remote. I feel like I need to hold my breath and be very intentional with my swipes so when I'm e.g. swiping up/down to get to a menu where I can turn on subtitles I don't accidentally swipe left or right, sending me scrubbing 17 minutes forward.

Either touch is a bad input mechanism for controlling your TV, or Apple hasn't figured it out.

The latest remote at least has directional buttons, and I think you can disable the touch part entirely. Might be worth looking into, I think you can buy it separately and it works with most if not all Apple TV's.

Yeah, I hate the remote, which is why I never use Apple TV even though I both own one and have the Apple TV service.

Maybe I'll try the remote the other user here mentioned.

I’ve had one of these remotes almost since they came out:

https://function101.com/products/button-remote-for-apple-tv?...

The newer Apple Remote has directional buttons, and you can then turn off the touch pad.

You could try the Salt remote. From what I remember they got permission from Apple and it’s officially supported.

https://www.salt.ch/en/internet-tv/equipment/remote-control

Didn't Apple replace that remote with a proper clicky remote like five years ago?

Sort of. It's an improvement but it still have major issues. The biggest being the goddamn search button on the side that you hit 50% of the time you pick up or set down the remote, that can't be disabled, and that yanks you straight out of whatever you're viewing.

Why is that ironic? The Apple TV unit reminds me of the old Apple. Simple and solid.

Perhaps but even better is not streaming at all and actually "owning"* your entertainment.

* In the sense that no one can take it away and you can give it to someone else when you want.

ever since tvOS came out (and by extension, the app store) they've really leapfrogged every other streaming box. I would have thought android-based boxes like Nvidia's shieldtv would have won here (and created a casual gaming platform) but I was dead wrong.

i worked on a roku tv app once upon a time... and their OS couldn't even draw circle primitives. frustrating.

Subjective, of course, but Apple is the new HBO. They don't have the massive amount of content, but they go for quality.

Definitely. It's un-bloated and simple in a sea of options that are progressively slower and shittier.

Bingo.

Again Apple's offering is the worst apart from every other one on the market.

Ironic how?

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