What new device should I buy that direct play's AV1 content?

[abpjf]

To clarify, I have my JF client set to always ask if I want to use an external client (VLC) for playback, so technically I guess VLC is playing it back on the Shield without transcoding, which doesn't really matter. The TLDR is that the Shield seems to be perfectly capable of playing AV1 natively via VLC.

afaik Shield doesn't support hardware decoding of AV1 - VLC is likely using software decoding, which is not always good but depends on what you're playing

you can confirm by checking the cpu usage via adb shell with the 'top' command while playing something

hardly makes any change in CPU usage vs idle, 1%-3%tile, within the realm of nonexistent or margin-of-error. which pretty much comes back to it making no real difference how it's playing it back "natively" - my takeaway is that if JF server says it's feeding direct, then I take it for granted that it is direct. I (granted, subjectively) see no qualitative difference when it's playing "direct" via JF+VLC on the Android client vs playing the file on an RTX-4x/ARC-7x equipped desktop PC.

interesting though that it (JF) makes no distinction as to whether something is being "directly" played back via SW or HW decoding. I guess the long and short of it, in my view at least, is that 'what does it really matter whether AV1 is playing back via SW or HW decoding' - especially if JF itself sees no distinction vis a vis its definition of "direct playback."

as long as I don't get stutters / dropouts, why worry for nothing?

EDIT: if it matters, the specific content being used for the above discourse is an episode of 'The Winter King' encoded via Handbrake (latest version) in 1080p AV1 @ a reported average bitrate of 3200kbps with an E-AC3 DD5.1 track and .ass subs (if activated), re-encoded on an ARC-750.

EDIT II: I did putz around with a couple of different 'off brand' Android STBs that use various HW-decode AV1 chipsets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware) and they both SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED royally on AV1 playback. Freezes / dropouts / stutters galore... Even using the VLC-handoff method. The fact that they seemed to enforce HW decoding (vs trying SW or someway to choose SW) was a big detriment in that case.