anyone using a Nexus Player or other Android TV device?

[johnsonx42]

I recently got a trial for HBO Now, and then set about watching easily on my TV. Turns out there's no HBO Now app for my samsung smart bluray player. I saw that Fry's had the Roku SE on promo for the $25 black friday price, so I picked one up. Worked ok, but wasn't really impressed... slow as hell in some spots, and the ecosystem seemed limited. So I looked further... what I really wanted was a device that could do Netflix, HBO, Kodi, maybe even play some games (but I'm way cheap). A bit of searching revealed the Nexus Player would supposedly do all that, and it was on-sale at Best Buy for $50 (funny how a free trial of HBO lead to spending $25 which lead to spending $50!).

I setup the Nexus Player last night, and initially it seemed very impressive. However as the night wore on, warts appeared. First, it routinely lost connection to my WiFi network, sometimes every minute or two, other times running fine for 30 minutes or more. No other device in the house has any issue with my WiFi that I've noticed. A few times it seemed to just quit what it was doing for no reason, and once it locked up and I had to pull it's plug. After installing the last of at least 10 system updates, each of which required a reboot and install time, it lost communication with the remote. Fortunately I had installed the Google remote app on my smartphone, so I proceeded with that for awhile, until a message came up on screen saying the Android Remote Service had crashed and that remote stopped working too. About 15 minutes later that message disappeared and the phone remote started working again... I watched a few more things and finally went to bed. Today I sorted out how to re-pair the included remote.

I'm going to pick up an Ethernet adapter and an OTG cable at Fry's tonight to solve the network connection issues, and hopefully now that the updating is done and the remote is re-paired that issue will be gone along with the random quits/lockup (those all happened before all the updates were in).

Anyone else have one of these things, got any comments, tips, whatever?

[johnsonx42]

a brief followup, it turns out I do have a real network problem, it's not the Nexus Player's fault. Other glitches were going unnoticed or being chalked up to "the internet isn't perfect". Looks like something is wrong with the TWC modem/router box, even two wired clients connected directly to the TWC box are having problems communicating with each other.

[pcostanza]

I got the Nvidia Shield a number of months back. It's not yet used for my primary viewing but will be in the next few months. I wasn't crazy about the wifi so I ran ethernet to it and it works like a champ.
I've been curious about those ethernet adapters and have been meaning to grab one to try out.
I was looking at the Nexus but the new Apple TV looks good too though more expensive. I can say I'm pleased with how Android TV works.

[johnsonx42]

Let me say that when it works right, this Nexus Player is amazing. However I've had nothing but trouble with mine; it continues to drop the internet connection randomly and frequently after I've corrected other potential network issues, and it's crashed out of many apps and completely locked up a couple of times in just a few evenings' fiddling. I decided to simply hope that I got a flaky unit, since the problems I'm having don't seem to be widely reflected in online reviews. This morning I boxed it up and went back to Best Buy imagining that I'd grab another one off the shelf... no such luck, apparently these things have been selling like hotcakes since they went on sale and now there are no Nexus Players in stock at any Best Buy within 50 miles or so. They're shipping me another one to arrive on Wednesday, so I kept mine for now since I have another 10 days to return it.

[dgeezer]

I've had the Shield since it first came out. It's been the main player for us ever since. I run Kodi on the box and we never exit it back to the Android TV interface.

I run X-newa in Kodi to get the Npvr interface on kodi. We use this to view recordings and schedule recordings from 2 antennas in the attic. I've stripped down the ui to only have the guide and recordings. This gives nearly perfect playback and comskip works.

We access the androiod netflix app from kodi.

I have setup the HDHomerun view app for live tv for my wife. This makes her happy since with one click live tv is playing.

This box has been absolutely rock solid. I have it set up with a harmony smart hub remote. This isn't perfect for kodi since it doesn't have all the keys needed for library maintenance etc. I almost always plug in my Logitech K400 keyboard for any maintenance tasks. This keyboard works great if you have the dongle on an extension cable and not plugged in to the back of the shieldtv. There are some issues with usb3 ports interfering with the wireless keyboard's reception.

[johnsonx42]

I've found that Kodi only works moderately ok with US TV on the Nexus Player, because it has no hardware MPEG-2 decode or de-interlacing capability. Apparently, from what I've read, it was much worse originally, but recent releases of Kodi have managed to make 1080i more-or-less watchable. The only de-interlacing method available is Bob (and bob-inverted), which of course is ugly but better than nothing. Interlacing is a crime we really shouldn't have to put up with in 2016, but there it still is on half of my broadcast channels. This is where I'd have been much better off getting an NVidia Shield, but those cost 4 times as much too.

I'm still finding the box to be a bit flaky at times (this is the second one I've had), and I find myself more often than not reverting to watching TV using the HTPC directly instead of using Kodi on the Nexus Player. I guess what I really should do is disconnect my HTPC from the TV for awhile, so that I have no choice but to use Kodi and see how I get on.

My daughter and I have enjoyed playing games on it; my son completely ignores it like anything else that isn't Kerbal Space Program. I dug up two old Logitech wireless gamepads I'd almost never used (they were for a long-standing but never implemented plan to add games to the HTPC), and discovered they work just fine.

Interesting thing I discovered today: I'd been having problems with the apps stored on the USB drive I'd plugged in being VERY slow to load and would frequently hang up for awhile when running. I knew the flash drive I'd used wasn't exactly the fastest ever, but I didn't think it was that slow. Then I got to wondering about the USB hub I had connected... it's one I had laying around for awhile, but surely it must be USB 2.0? Nope. Turns out it was USB 1.1, so the Nexus Player was struggling to read/write the data at 12mbps! Oddly however, having removed the hub and directly connected the flash drive for now, it isn't really that much faster; it boots faster, the apps stored on the USB show up at the same time as the rest of the apps whereas before they showed up a good minute+ later, but actually running the apps stored there still seems much slower than expected. Guess I'll have to do some research on what flash drives work well with the Nexus Player.