Closed Ecosystems Suck

I was recently looking for solution to play games from my very beefy gaming desktop (5950X, 4090, 64GB RAM, the works) on my equally beefy but-in-the-wrong-room theatre room TV. I'd been toying with the idea of running fibre optic HDMI and USB for quite some time (and I might, ultimately, go back to that idea eventually) but I decided to give Sunshine/Moonlight a try.

Unfortunately, the CPU and Fast Ethernet on offer with my TV simply weren't up to the task of handling the bitrate required for the sort of low latency, visually lossless experience I wanted out of the streaming experience. I had similar issues when trying to stream remuxes I'd ripped from my bluray collection and popped on my Jellyfin server.

So it was time to search for a new box to handle my home theatre streaming needs. And what an eye opening experience it was.

I was originally thinking a Mini PC. I'd considered something similar to a Ryzen 7940HS (or a bit newer) with a capable CPU and iGPU that could handle smaller games and emulation on the machine, but could stream the really hard hitting stuff from my desktop. I was almost set on this, and was looking at alternative launchers to use to give the PC (which would most likely be running Bazzite) a simpler, Android TV-esque experience.

Then I discovered something called Widevine. If you're unfamiliar, Widevine is a DRM solution owned by Google and utilised by a number of streaming services including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. The hardware implementation of Widevine is present on Android and iOS devices, allowing viewers full access to the content on these services. On PC platforms, only the lower "Widevine L3" DRM is available, allowing viewers to access to content at fixed (lower) resolutions - usually topping out at 1080p.

This presents a problem to my idea of running an x64-based Mini PC with Linux as my HTPC. Could I access the content I'd be missing in... other... ways? Sure, but that betrayed the simple and easy experience I wanted as part of the HTPC build.

So, begrudgingly, I started my hunt for a powerful Android/Google TV device that could handle everything I wanted with some power to spare. But there is a whole extra kettle of fish associated with that, too. Not every device you see advertised as a TV device running Android is a "Google TV Device". Indeed, plenty of them run the variety of Android you'd see on your smartphone, without the tweaks and changes which make them truly effective devices in the home theatre. Plenty of them also don't have the full Widevine L1 DRM level required to access 4k content, leaving you at the same place you were running an x64 Mini PC.

Looking for proper certified Google TV devices significantly narrows the search results. All of them the high specced, high RAM devices fall into the "not certified" bucket, leaving a collection of mostly anaemic boxes. There was only one device that truly fell into the performance bucket I was looking for, and it came with its own distinct set of limitations, too.

If you're in the Android TV game, you probably know what I'm about to say. Yep, it's the Nvidia Shield TV Pro. This venerable beast is from back in 2019 - hardly groundbreaking tech. It utilises an Nvidia Tegra X1+ SoC - an ARM-based processor and the same you'd expect to see in the second gen (Lite, OLED) models of the original Switch. So it's got plenty of power onboard, but it lacks some modern features (AV1 decode, YouTube HDR, HDMI 2.1 output). So it's probably the best high powered option, but with definite trade offs. Nvidia haven't announced any plans for a Tegra X2-based Shield, so we'll see when/if that becomes a reality.

So with that choice made, it was time to get the device and do the customisation required on it. Which is another headache. Google makes it very difficult to change the default launcher on Google TV, leaving you with the somewhat enshittified default one. But after enable developer options and ADB, I was able to uninstall the default launchers and switched to my preferred one (currently Projectivy, but we'll see if anything else catches my fancy).

I also battled for some time to get my 8BitDo Ultimate 2 working properly with the Shield TV Pro. I eventually worked out that having Accessibility Services enabled (which was needed before I used ADB to switch the default launcher) actively breaks the xbox/guide button on controllers. This took some hours to work out, too!

In summary, what should have been a smooth, easy experience of setting up my HTPC became a complicated mess, leaving me with a powerful but flawed box in the process. Closed ecosystems suck!