www.makemkv.com

Nvidia Shield
Oppo 203
Denon 4300
Sony 770DH (to power rear Atmos/DTS-X speakers)
Pioneer Andrew Jones 7.2.4 Speakers
LG OLED 65B7A

~HaMMeR~ wrote:Zidoo X8 and X9S here - perfect UHD HDR playback with Atmos and DTS:X. Half the price of the Shield - no brainer really

Hadn't even heard of them before, thanks for the mention.

HTPC Win10 running Kodi DSPlayer + madVR.

I am watching my 4k movies on a hard drive attached to my TV via USB. I rip the movie with the HD audio and my TV plays the MKV files with no problem. Audio is output from the TV to the receiver. I can stream 1080p from my NAS but haven't tried 4K yet. TV is a Samsung 82mu8000(2017 model).

Sanman68

Plex Media server on PC built with FX8350, 12GB Ram to Shield TV > Yamaha 2060 > Epson 5040UB
No issues at all. 10Bit HDR with Atmos / DTS:X

Nvidia Shield running SPMC (a fork of Kodi focused on Android) over GB ethernet. It has no problem playing back MKV rips of UHD disks and there are lots of nerdy options in SPMC. The Shield passes through the audio bitstream so my receiver can decode Atmos/DTS X.......

Another vote for the SHIELD. I've got a NAS setup and running over my gigabit network. Rip on my HTPC, transfer to the NAS, and plex on the SHIELD happily serves it up to any device on my network, transcoding in hardware if needed. Playback on the SHIELD itself is direct (no transcoding) and bitstreams just fine.

Has anyone else experience brief (one second or less) audio drops when watching 4K disc rips with lossless audio (no transcoding) on the Shield over your LAN? I have zero problems with Blu rays, but it seems like just about every 4K MKV rip I try experiences several brief audio drops throughout the course of a movie. I have tried both Kodi and Emby, same results. However, if I copy the movie to the local storage on the Shield, I seem to be able to play it without issue in Kodi. I have tried hosting the files from my unraid server as well as a Windows 10 box, same symptoms. Task manager on the host shows CPU, disk, and network all under 10% utilization while watching. When I copy files across the network, I can sustain over 100 MegaBytes for hours on end.

Any ideas? Everything else is working perfectly but I'm running out of things to try. It sounds like others may be running this way without issue.

Just wanted to update it looks like it may be something odd with the NIC or NIC driver/software on the Shield. Nvidia is going to open a bug report. Details on my troubleshooting can be found on Nvidia's forum.

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... dio-drops/

A few people running an Nvidia Shield here it seems.

I have a problem with surround sound on mine, connected to a DTS\THD\ATMOS etc receiver, but MX player will only output surround in HW decoder mode. SW, HW+ output just PCM stereo, regardless of the audio track selected (DTS, DTS HD etc.).

Main issue is that I cannot seek backwards and forwards in HW mode.

How have you set up your shield to handle surround? Different media player app? As I said, I'm running MX Player, with the content being delivered from a NAS via Mezzmo.

I'm using Emby, but in my troubleshooting to figure out my playback issues, I also tried Kodi, SPMC, & MrMC. All allowed me to "passthrough" or "bitstream" the audio to my receiver so I could get Atmos/DTSX/DD/DTS/etc.

My main setup:

Display: Vizio P-Series 65"
Receiver: Denon AVR-S720W
Speakers: Klipsch Ref Series: 2 Bookshelf, 1 Center Channel, 4 Surround, 12" Sub
HTPC: Home Built Gaming Rig
Home Server: Home Built Win 10 4U server (based off the Norco 4224 case). Current capacity is 26TB using SnapRAID with triple parity (can tolerate 3 dead drives and still rebuild the array).

Now if I could just figure out how to get a Dolby Vision signal from the PC to the TV (HDR10 works fine), I'll be set.

eng050599 wrote:
Now if I could just figure out how to get a Dolby Vision signal from the PC to the TV (HDR10 works fine), I'll be set.

Unfortunately for everyone on a HTPC, not until a current PC software UHD disk player developer obtains access the DV enhancement layer plus metadata officially (paying Dolby license) or unofficially.

Becuase DV is closed source that may be difficult, but not impossible. We may just need to be a bit patient.

st4evr wrote:Unfortunately for everyone on a HTPC, not until a current PC software UHD disk player developer obtains access the DV enhancement layer plus metadata officially (paying Dolby license) or unofficially.

Becuase DV is closed source that may be difficult, but not impossible. We may just need to be a bit patient.

Oh believe me I know. I can see the metadata when the files are analyzed, but yeah, there's no current methods to have any of the Windows playback options to deal with it.

I don't even think that Cyberlink can handle DV at this time, and that's a close to "official" as you can get.

I use the Roku Media Player on a Roku Premiere Plus 4K over DLNA (TCP) to play the mkv files generated from my legally purchased UHD discs.
My DLNA server is an old version Ubuntu running minidlna.

The Roku app identifies the file as "Super HD" while correctly listing the 2160p resolution.

The Roku app tended to error out on UHD files where I included the subtitles, but when I removed them, they played just fine.

My TV is an LG OLED65b6p. I do see the HDR indicator appear when playing these files on the Roku, and the tv switches to HDR specific display settings.
The TV's built-in app doesn't seem to play any of the UHD .mkv files except John Wick, which is of the same specs. However, the TV's built-in app has played 4k demos before. The TV can also play 1080p mkvs with no problem. Not sure what it is choking on, which is why I'm using the Roku instead.

The Roku Premiere Plus 4K only has a 100Mbit NIC, while my server has gigabit. Yet, so far, none of the mkv files have a bitrate that stressed the connection even with PHY/ETH/IP/TCP overhead.
However, should that become a problem in the future, my wireless router is positioned right next to it (a few inches), and I'll see if a really close wireless connection will outperform the wired.

Haven't tried surround passthrough because I don't have a 4k capable AVR.


Though the Roku doesn't support DV, I've tried playing an m2ts file with TV's app to see if it would play, but the TV app just seemed to spin on file (it doesn't do that with the other files, even the ones it can't play).

I'm not too thrilled with the design that Dolby has used for DV in UHD discs (having a separate video stream just the DV content feels like a synchronization nightmare).
But, assuming each frame can have a TLV similar extension to contain the color meta data, I would think it would be possible to reassemble the PES packets from the main m2ts video stream and the DV stream and attach the DV data as extension to the appropriate frame....assuming DV is per frame instead of per scene, in which case....ugh.