2025-04-18, 09:57 PM
(2025-04-18, 09:36 PM)TheDreadPirate Wrote: I'm not sure what you're reading about the Android TV client, but, IMO, the Android TV client is our best non-PC client for video content viewing. A close 2nd is our Roku client.
The smoothness of the UI experience is very device dependent. The UI experience on my new-ish Google TV streamer is butter. The UI experience on my parent's Sony TV, with the built in Android TV capability, is stuttery due to TV manufacturers skimping on the SoC they use in their TVs.
Personally, I really don't like the UI for Kodi. Gave it a go a year or so ago, due to how fanatic Kodi users are, and I am not a fan.
For the non-tech savvy, stick with either an Android TV device or Roku device. I can highly recommend the Roku Ultra 4800X (or 4802X). I believe there are a couple newer ultras available.
Onn TV devices (Android TV) are great value for the capabilities. Amazon FireCUBES, not Firesticks, are good. Most Firesticks use an SoC with a bugged mediatek chipset that make them unable to play Dolby Vision profiles 7 and 8 and HDR10+ content. Though they can play plain HDR10 just fine and Dolby Vision profile 5. For the same reason, I also cannot recommend the Google TV Streamer since it uses the same family of bugged mediatek chipsets. While I own one and like it, I also convert all my HDR content to plain HDR10.
Thanks for this response! Maybe the issues I was seeing regarding HDR10+ and Dolby Vision were actually due to the chipset problems that you mentioned, and I conflated that with it being and Android TV problem. I did wonder if the sluggishness problems I'd seen mentioned were just hardware/network limitations as well, some of the threads I read had people who seemed to believe it was an issue with the client not the hardware, but it's entirely possible they were just wrong. Regardless, this is helpful in limiting what devices I should be looking at.