Ok so I just bought a Shield 16gb - I bought a 128gb SD card to go with it - both arrived today. If the Profiles folder doesn’t exist on your system, then you should create it.Received the error message above when I tried to complete the initial Plex Media Server install. You should save it to a file named, Android-SHIELD Android TV.xml and place it in Plex > Library > Application Support > Plex Media Server > Profiles. Among other benefits, it will transcode your Apple Lossless music files to FLAC format. Here is an optimized profile for the Shield that reduces the need for the PMS to transcode audio and video. The net effect is that Plex transcodes audio and video to the Shield Android TV when it doesn’t need to, resulting in lower audio/video quality and more server load.

So, it’s a bit surprising that Plex uses a generic Android profile when streaming audio and video to the Shield. The Shield also supports a wide variety of container formats: ASF, AVI, DivX, M2TS/, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG-TS, WEB-M, and Xvid. Notably Apple Lossless is not natively supported. The Shield also supports hardware decoding for AAC, AAC+, AMR, DD+/DTS (pass-through), Dolby Atmos (pass-through), Dolby TrueHD (pass-through), DTS-X, and DTS-HD (pass-through), eAAC+, FLAC, MP3, OGG Vorbis, PCM, WAV, WMA, WMA-Pro, WMA-Lossless audio codecs. The Shield has hardware decoding support for VP8, VP9, H.263, H.264, H.265/HEVC, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, and WMV9/VC1 video codecs. Even if it does, transcoding increases latency and reduces audio/video quality.įortunately, the Shield Android TV supports a number of audio and video codecs as well as container formats. This is because your NAS (file server) likely doesn’t have the spare CPU to transcode. In reality, you don’t want to transcode videos if your client can play audio or video files. One of Plex’s notable features is the ability to transcode any media that a client is not able to play natively. Plex is a major partner of Nvidia, including preinstalling Plex software on the Shield Android TV. And, I run the Plex client on my Nvidia Shield Android TV settop boxes. I run the Plex media server on my Synology NAS.

Plex is one of the best client-server, multi-room media solutions on the market today.

Nvidia shield plex media server setup