Does anyone has successfully rolled back to the old UI plex? I tried to install manually the old version but it takes the new version every time..

So this is more of a PSA because this happened to me 3 times.

So earlier this year in April, I purchased a 2019 Shield from Best Buy. It refused to join my Google Home at all. I could not add it to a room. It would just simply error out and say error when linking device. Tried this on my phone, my wife's iPhone. I tried adding another Google account to my Home and testing it. I even went as far as making a new Google Home and trying that. I tried that same process on a different Google account. Nothing worked. I simply returned that unit to Best Buy and got a second unit that would immediately shut itself off after it came under any sort of load, such as downloading apps from the Play Store.

I then purchased a third unit from Best Buy after doing an exchange, and that one was perfect, worked just fine, added to my Google Home. I was happy.

Now, I then purchased a new Shield TV this past week. I managed to get one from Best Buy online. Seemed to be the last one they had in stock. From the serial number, it looks like it was produced in June of 2026. I was able to decode that based on the scheme used for the NVIDIA Jetson devices. This device had the same issue as the one from April, but this time I did a little bit more debugging over ADB and found that it was throwing a 400 error trying to register with Google. It was nothing to do with my account. It was just simply Google rejecting the cast ID of the device. Now, I contacted NVIDIA support. They were very slow to help me and basically helpless. They could not do anything. I got a really high-level agent, and he just did not really do much, unfortunately. It was really a shame, because in the past when I had issues with NVIDIA, they were excellent.

Even a couple years back with my 2017 Shield, I purchased it in 2017, and in 2019 it died. They replaced it on the spot, no issues, two years out of warranty. It was crazy. So I've had great experiences with them in the past. I'm not sure what changed. Finally, I managed to find another unit from Abt. That is a reseller based out of Illinois. They are an authorized reseller. They had excellent customer service and sent me a unit pretty quickly. I decoded the serial of that. It was actually produced same time, June 2026. it is actually a few serial numbers apart in the same batch. It actually and unfortunately had the same linking issue as the other unit. I actually also did some digging, and it appears that both units were made for the Canadian market, which is very strange given that they were both sold in the US, and I'm based in the US.

Now finally, I did some more digging against my working 2019 Shield that I purchased earlier this year, and they have different intermediary certificates than the one that is working compared to the two that don't work. The certificates are just totally different, and they seem to be being rejected by Google.

So as someone who loves my Shield devices, I just wanted to share this more as a PSA to the community about the units being produced currently. I don't know what is going on. I reported the serial numbers to NVIDIA as well as the retailers that I purchased from, including the Best Buy that I will be returning the device to, given that they are $300 and I spent $600 on two of them, and I need my money back because that's a lot of money.

So hopefully someone at NVIDIA will be able to obtain those units based on the serials and the stores and maybe hopefully do an investigation and try to fix this for others. I did that more as a good citizen and someone who really cares about the Shield devices and ecosystem. I hope NVIDIA fixes this, but I wanted to just share this experience just in case someone runs into this in the future and has this issue. I could find no way on my end to fix it. NVIDIA was not really able to help me, and the only solution is to just keep returning until you get one that is able to join your Google Home. It was able to cast fine. It was a matter of adding it to a room. For example, if you want to use your Google Home speaker to control a device, like turn it on and off using the speaker, that is impossible to do. It just is impossible to add to a home. It will work for cast, but not work for control commands such as turn this TV on, turn this TV off, raise the volume, lower the volume, that sort of thing.

Now, a workaround would be to add it to Home Assistant and control it that way if it really is impossible to fix and matters to someone a lot, and you cannot obtain another unit. That is a workaround, of course. It's not ideal and shouldn't have to happen, but it's possible to go that route.

Now, I am not sharing this as a knock against the Shield. I love the Shield. I have owned them for 10 years now. I have owned several units over the last 10 years. I have loved them, and I really am upset that I got two bad units in a row from two different retailers in different parts of the country. It's just super strange, and the fact that it also happened to me in April is super strange.

I'm making this post to share with others, so if anyone else runs into this issue, it's just known that this is happening, at least to me, on three different units purchased at different times throughout 2026, and I could not do anything to solve it, and it was independent of my Google account, my Google Home, and based on my debugging over ADB, it seemed like it was something to do with the device being rejected outright by Google.

Sorry for the wall of text. I just wanted to give a thorough explanation of what I ran into and share this with the broader community, so hopefully this doesn't happen to anyone else, and there is some content out there explaining what happened to me.

So I just noticed some severe lacking of bass on my Shield Pro when routed through my headphone amp combo DAC.

HPA has been tested with same file played from the Shield through the pc. TV has been tested with another device and all seems fine there too. I have checked auto volume leveler etc, but something is wrong here. I can hear distinct differences playback of Shield to pc.

The optical out of the tv feeds both my Foxtel box and Shield so it's not the tv as an issue.

I have Dolby processing turned off too. I don't use a sound bar so stereo output is fine, no need for surround.

YT is giving me better sound than what the Shield is currently giving me.

Any advice? FYI, I am using KODInerds.

EDIT I will add I did change some audio settings in Kodi, but it still hasn't fixed that bottom end. I have it set at 2.0 and passthrough enabled.

i have 3 shield pros for my house TVs and I'm kicking myself for not buying a travel shield since they're apparently $299 now and sold out everywhere

what's a good alternative for just using Kodi to play mkv files on a SanDisk 512gb flash drive?

thank you!

Hi all, I made LumaFin, with a lot of help from AI coding tools (I’m a network engineer, not a programmer by trade). It’s a fork of the official Jellyfin Android TV app that I built for my own setup and decided to share. Free, open source, no ads, no tracking.

Edit: added the AI note up top since a few people asked. Fair point, should’ve said it from the start.

The feature people seem to like most: audio and subtitle pickers right on the movie and episode screen, so you choose before pressing Play, like the Jellyfin web client. It also remembers those choices per series, season or episode.

Other things I added:

- New look across Home, details, menus and the player

- Download subtitles from your server's providers, plus subtitle and audio timing adjustment

- Library filters you can combine (genre, year, rating, resolution, runtime, watched, favorites)

- Edit the video queue during playback, sleep timer, spoiler protection for unwatched episodes

- Quick user switching with separate Home layouts per user

It's in closed testing on Google Play, and Google needs 12 testers for 14 days before a public release. I'm 4 short. If you've got a Shield and a Jellyfin server and want to try it:

1. Join the testers group with the Google account on your Shield: https://groups.google.com/g/lumafin-testers
2. Opt in: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/io.github.bagodees.lumafin
3. Install LumaFin from Play on the Shield. It can take a few minutes to show up.

It installs alongside the official Jellyfin app, so you're not giving anything up. Please stay opted in for 14 days.

Source: https://github.com/bagodees/LumaFin-AndroidTV

Site: https://getlumafin.com

Bug reports and "this is confusing" feedback are very welcome. I'll be around to answer questions.

We get these instead of a new Shield i guess wtf.

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DY4XaQkAa/

I've been building this for a few months on my own Shield.

It's called Hearth (Hearth Launcher on Play). Put in your own provider login or an m3u and the guide's right on the home screen, favorites, groups, search, channel keeps playing while you poke around. If you've got Home Assistant, your rooms, lights, camera snapshots and weather are there too. Don't have it? skip it.

It can switch lights and fans but won't touch locks, alarms or garage doors. A remote on the couch is the least guarded thing in the house.

No account, no analytics, nothing phoning home: hearthlauncher.com

It's free. If something breaks let me know, I read everything

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.doitup.hearth

Has anybody else had issues with the triangular remote (v2 with the rear cover button) being an absolute battery monster? I disabled the lighting, and two AAAs last about 2-3wks of evening-only use.

Is the remote active whilst the Shield is off and not sleeping correctly or something along those lines?

I've seen a mish mash of Q&A's on this and just wanted to try and get some summary considerations here.

* Presently I have the Nvidia Shield 2019 with 16 GB internal storage.

* Running Projectivy as a launcher and TiviMate for Streams.

I want to attach an external drive thru one of the USB ports that will allow TiviMate to record and play back from the External Drive.

One assumption- Remove the IPTV provider entirely out of this discussion. I am strictly looking at a "perfect world" set up. If the signal is excellent- what's the optimum setup to record and play from an Nvidia Shield EXTERNAL storage device and TiviMate?

My questions are:

1. What size and drive type has been proven to stay connected and recognized for recording and playback of data.
2. What settings need to be configured in Android / Nvidia to create a seamless external storage
3. What settings in TiviMate need to be configured to record and later play seamlessly from external storage

thanks in advance for any suggestions

I'm a solo dev and I've been building a Google TV app called HuddleTape. Your friends upload a screenshot of their pick slip from their phone, it reads the slip, and a ticker across the bottom of the TV shows everyone's open picks, live chances and payouts while you watch.

Google makes new developers run a 14-day closed test with at least 12 people before an app can go public on the Play Store, and that's where I'm stuck. My friends mostly don't have the right TV.

What you'd need:

• A Google TV or Android TV, like a TCL/Hisense/Sony with Google TV, a Chromecast with Google TV, a Google TV Streamer, an onn. box, or a Shield
• Keep it installed for 14 days and tell me what breaks

Testers get a free year once it launches. It doesn't take bets or link to any sportsbook, it just shows your picks. 21+ only.

Thanks for your time and consideration!

https://huddletape.app/beta

Just a recommendation for those who have missed it, you can clean up your Shield to use less ram and disable the stock Android launcher really easily

https://github.com/bryanroscoe/shield_optimizer

Hi All,

My plex server worked a treat with all of my movies until the update.
AAC 5.1 Movies default now to stereo on my system and it is driving me crazy, im unsure of how to fix it?

I have the following

• Nvidia TV Shield Pro
• Dolby audio processing o
• Sonos Playbar , sub and surround
• Passthrough set to Optical with Dolby digital and Dolby on
• Sony TV with Earc

Any ideas on how I can get this working again?

Many thanks

Coming from Apple, it's sometimes not wise to perform an update since you can never revert if needed. Is this potentially the case with Shield TV.

I have a 2019 Pro and wondering what the community would advise, since, from a hardware perspective it is old - so I guess it wouldn't necessarily need the latest version of Android.

PS. anyone know of a good guide for stripping it down from bloatware etc. and have it running nice and lean?

I’ve been using IPTV Smarters but I guess there are much more capable apps now. Is the consensus on what is the best?

Doesn't scrape anything beyond that? Is there such a thing? I also mention this as a front-end only because my collection is anime and often has multiple subtitle tracks that not every media player handles properly so being able to then tell it to use my player of choice is important if it doesn't handle multiple sub tracks simultaneously.

I am giving up on trying to get my mostly anime media collection to play nice with the scrapers available in kodi and such. Episode order is a hassle, getting certain obscure series to read correctly is a hassle.

My ideal at this point would be if MX Player Pro let you add a poster image as the outer file image and then opened onto the episode list with no further scraping. My episodes are named well enough for me to navigate them, I don't need fancy summaries and episode scraping but having posters on the folders would be nice.

DO NOT suggest Plex, Jellyfin or other media servers. The files are on a dedicated drive attached to the shield, I do not have a pc to run as a dedicated server.

Hi team,

Im encountering trouble with some movies.

When im trying to play 4k remux with 7.1 Dolby atmos, sometimes, the image froze and the sound goes crazy like stuttering but you actually have to stop the video because it’s noisy. Then I restart the movie, goes 10 seconds and boom same.

Only with 7.1

The setup is :
Sonos > TV into earc hdmi > into shield by HDMI premium cable

And PLEX App

Do you have some ideas ?

Good morning. I have three Shield TVs (2019), all of which lost ethernet today. They can connect to Wifi perfectly fine. But, in the middle of watching something, they all decided to stop using their ethernet at once. Local sources do not work, nor do WAN sources. I disabled any network blocking as well as performed a factory reset on one, to no effect. All will pull down an IP address on Ethernet, but show no internet connection.

Other devices on my network are working fine. Connecting the shields via Wifi is fine. They are refusing to use their ethernet ports. It's conspicuous that all three did it at the same time. Regardless of the cause, I am disappointed that something (whatever it is) can somehow cause all three of my shields to give up ethernet functionality.

I currently have a controller for my pc. If I connect the dock to my pc, the controller works via 2.4G. I just tried the same on the Shield and that didn't work. Does it have to be the dongle directly? Unable to test for now until I get USB C to USB A adapter

Was in the neighborhing city which took over an hour and a half to get there with public transport but the guy was super nice and had a spare he was willing to sell!

Unlike shield tv2015 inside.More details.

Anyone else experiencing this issue? It doesn’t happen often, but whenever it does, it’s after I exit a movie playing in Dolby Vision or HDR through Plex. The screen just goes crazy with colors everywhere and I have to turn off and back on to resolve it.

It's a 2019 Shield Pro.

Hello, I'm trying to find a game that was removed from Google Play The Talos Principle, version v324054. I found the original APK file, but I couldn't find the cache file (OBB) for patch.324054.com.devolver.Talos.obb... The one posted on APK websites online is corrupted (it comes from the same source but has a different hash than the original). I’d appreciate any help; I doubt I’ll find it anywhere else but here.

After searching everywhere online and seeing "out of stock" notices across every single retailer, I got ridiculously lucky and grabbed what was literally the last unit available on Amazon across Europe for €247!

I’m pairing it with an LG G5 OLED 77" and a Samsung HW-Q990F soundbar system. The main goal is getting full lossless audio pass-through (TrueHD / Atmos / DTS:X) which built-in TV apps can’t deliver. Later on, I’ll be setting up Nuvio as my primary media front-end.

​For those running a similar setup:

- ​Any essential Shield settings I should toggle on day one (AI upscaling, match frame rate, developer settings)?

- ​Direct HDMI into the Q990F vs. through the TV via eARC:

what has been the most stable in your experience?

​Hyped to finally have one in hand!

Is there still any interest in a working apple music app built specifically for the shield?

I'm close to having something built, planned it for personal use (been frustrated with sideloaded apps not working properly). I've realised I need to maintain an apple developer account and rotate the keys to keep the app functioning, so won't be as simple as passing around an apk and will carry a cost.

I plan to build and then publish it via the app store so hopefully no sideloading, etc.

*** UPDATE 21-10-2026 *** Beta 4 released

Beta testing - AT YOUR OWN RISK

I've published all the information in Git under https://github.com/GroovyForge/package-distro/tree/main/cored

The new beta includes a few new features, including QR login with Apple Music (the password sign in was a pain) and lyrics is back in.

I can add an optional update button in the app that could fetch new version automatically, if that's a feature you want just let me know.

If you use downloader the APP ID is 9881601