Posted 21 November 2023

Connect Hard Drive To Nvidia Shield Or Get A NAS For Streaming Video?

Hi, I have just bought a used Nvidia Shield TV Pro (2019) from eBay and want to use it to watch my ripped DVD's on my 2014 Samsung TV (1080p). I do have a 2nd Gen Firestick but it's gone incredibly slow and unresponsive which is why I decided to replace it with a Shield for running Plex or Kodi etc.

Is it better to connect an external hard drive to the Shield and store my media on that (mostly old TV shows and some films) and then install Plex or something to play them or should I get a NAS with some hard drives and then stream that to the Shield? I was thinking of getting a small hard drive for the shield to store apps on and then a bigger one to store all my media on.

I do have a gaming PC but I don't really want to stream files from there as it will use too much power, so I thought just using the Shield and a hard drive or a NAS would use less but perhaps I'm wrong.

Any help would be great.

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21st Nov 2023
You could also try installing 1 or 2 useful Android based media player's on the Shield too, I guess?

Notably VLC - as not only is it Cross-Platform, it also play's anything/everything! (video wise, that is).

And the other is MX Media Player - this is NOT as Cross-Platform as that of VLC, but it play's most, if not all things (video wise, that is) + it also supports HARDWARE video encoding/decoding too, actually.

Which of course could prove arguably PERFECT for your specific use case scenario thing too, basically? :-)

Ps.

A separate 'alternative' to alllllll the above, would perhaps be this also, a WD Media Player - WD, as in Western Digital (the same people that make the HDD's + SSD's, etc etc etc).

I'm NOT so sure as to what their continued support is like, mind?

As in, firmware wise, as in, bug fix wise, as in newer features/capabilities wise, and ...

What I DO know though,bis this however, back in the Day, their were veryyyyyyyy FEW hardware based Media Player's out there (with it's own integral software media playing interface, etc), that could touch it!

So ...

I believe eBay would prove your best friend in that regard for sourcing one of those out as well, yeh? :-)

Pps.

The power draw on the WD Media Player at the time, was barely nominal then (for what it was at the time anyway), so how much moreso that of now? (where it's alllllll about the running costs of ...

Speaking of 'costs', it costs barely£40-£50 at the time to buy it outright NEW!

So, with that above in mind, I'd say you'd likely get a slightly used one for the around the £20-£30, or so?

The reason I say that is, some peep's out there LUVVVVVVVVVVV IT, so of course (from a seller's perspective anyway), is therefore going too ...

(Let's just say, it's not rocket science, what I'm implying here?).

But either way, it would prove itself to serve you well, regardless.

And yes, you can DIRECTLY connect a portable (or non-portable) HDD to the WD Media Player, via 1 of it's in-built USB ports (I forget whether it came with 2 or 3 of them at the time?).

But alllllll useful nonetheless ...

Enjoy. :-)
Author
21st Nov 2023
Thanks very much for that detailed reply and suggestion about using the WD TV media players. I used to have an Iomega Screenplay HD that used to do this but I think I threw it away a long time ago. I will have a look into the WD devices as they seem like they would be perfect for me. I see on eBay plenty of people are selling the various models.

I do want something that has the ability to play random/shuffle episodes of TV shows I have on the hard drive. I think perhaps the TV Play can but I am not sure about the Live Hub or other models.
21st Nov 2023
I would go with the cheaper option (existing HDD/SSD or USB memory stick) to do some testing and see how things go before looking to buy anything.
Author
21st Nov 2023
Thanks, that's what I'm thinking at the moment. I have a spare 500GB external USB 3.0 hard drive so I can connect that with a few videos on to test. I have been reading so many conflicting posts about the best route to go, I am just confused now.

I've also read about connect a hard drive to your router but I have a BT Smart Hub 2 which does have a USB port but I think it only uses SMB1 which apparently is outdated and I am not sure how to get the Shield to find the drive through the router anyway.

For the time being I'll do some tests with a drive plugged directly into the Shield. I think I might take advantage of the current Plex Lifetime Pass offer too as I may need hardware transcoding.
22nd Nov 2023
If you’re media will require a lot of plex transcoding then go with the shield option and attach a hard drive . A NAS with the power to transcode to a decent standard is pretty pricey and if you have the shield anyway you may as well save the money.
22nd Nov 2023
I'm tight fisted. I also use VLC on my fire stick and plug an eld hard drive into my ee router via a cheap SATA to usb cable and it allows me to play files around the house.

Thought write speeds are terrible so have to plug the drive into my pc when copying something to it. But once set up streaming is great on VLC.
22nd Nov 2023
i have 4k firestick and sheild and use kodi which plays pretty much anything. if you connect the HDD to the sheild you can play via kodi directly. alternate is connect to a PC and use SMB shares

vlc is great on the pc, but i find the front end of kodi is far easier on a tv and using a kodi remote or mini bluetooth keyboard thing with touchpad or the kodi remote or kodi remote app or nvidia sheild remote app on your phone
22nd Nov 2023
The shield was a waste of money for 1080P or for most 4k, a £30 Amlogic Android box running coreelec can play 120GB 4K HDR HEVC rips without a problem, then you could have got a Raspberry Pi to connect an ext HDD to as a NAS and still spent less than the Shield.
Author
22nd Nov 2023
Thanks very much for all the replies, it's been really helpful. I think the cost of the Shield and for what I want to use it for was probably too much but I kept reading good reviews of it, so just went for it.

I will stick with the Shield and a external hard drive for now and either use Kodi or Plex and see how I get on. I can always sell the Shield and get something else if need be. I don't think getting a NAS is necessary for me really so I will put that on the back burner.

I have been looking at the Raspberry Pi and was considering getting that and connecting a hard drive to it but mainly after watching videos like this:
This is something I would love to do, create my own TV channel or channels and be able to just turn the TV on and have the Pi boot up automatically and flip to a station and there'll always be something on that I want to watch as it's all content on my hard drive. But it seems very complicated and I don't know anything about coding or using a Pi.
1 m ago
For a number of years I used a Shield Pro to play 4K movies successfully, including with Dolby Vision (DV) and Dolby Atmos (DA). My external drive was a 3.5" WD 'Black' gaming drive. The drive needs its own power supply but has a fast USB 3 interface and never glitched when streaming 4K. I bought the drive 2nd-hand from Cex as I wasn't too concerned about drive write wear as playing movies requires just write-once/read-many-times operations.

For the movie player I used something called JustPlayer (I think) as at the time it was the only one that supported both DV and DA. However, the player had a horrible interface so I eventually abandoned it in favour of a Zidoo box which is more like a consumer player and has a slot for a plug-in HDD and a front panel display.

P.S. My Shield Pro also doubled as a Plex Server for a few years but wasn't that reliable and had to be restored/reset about once a year. I now run Plex Server on a Synology DS920+ NAS and use my LG TV Plex app as the client. Plex on the NAS has NEVER failed but I wouldn't recommend it for streaming 4K, only 1080p.