atc98092 wrote:Well, there's quite a price difference between a Fire TV and the Nvidia Shield. But the Shield does support many more codecs, so transcoding is not needed for most files.
Since I have used either personally, I can't recommend apps for either of them. If your primary focus is audio, and not video, you might try one of the lower end Roku players. As I mentioned, they do support FLAC, and the Roku Media player does a pretty good job with Serviio.
you misunderstand - I already own both of fire TV, Shield TV boxes. and I use them both with Plex for videos. SO i am not looking for hardware recommendations.
but I don't want to use plex for audio, and I do want to use owned audio that is not available in spotify ( like purchased backing tracks/ play-alongs )
so I am testing what works with Serviio for flac + Mp3
also, as a fallback , having serviio for video working on fire tv will be good because if my internet ever goes down, plex sulks and will not work over LAN [ that is a known issue at plex, or a " featrure" . there are some alleged workarounds ]
strangely i tried the Archos video player on fire tv, that was useless as its video only, and it sees folders but then says empty directory-
so then I went back to trying vlc for fire again and it is now working. vlc is no longer saying empty folder but is displaying and playing music tracks. The only change since yesterday was assigning the roku profile to it. so either that made it work properly, or just leaving it overnight has allowed it to look and index the available serviio folders all by itself - seems unlikely
anyway I think I will stop while I am winnign there. Fire TV: audio - two working solutions vlc for fire app talking to my serviio pro server, or sideloaded serviigo android client app talking to same server - that has a niver interface and is probably the better of the two, but for anyone following this you have to sideload it to fire tv and it only works with a serviio paid-for pro server
for the shield TV - one option is to upload my music to Google for free, and then use the onboard google music app, but i don't much care for that. syncing is a pain to make work for new tracks, and browsing through a music collection is very basic. I should be able to install the servvgo android app to shield & use that with serviio server though