NVIDIA Shield or Raspberry PI for Mountain Cabin

Playground Hardware
#1

My step father passed away a few years ago and I've been helping my mom to do the upkeep on the family cabin in Western NC mountains that she spends about 6 months at. We've switched from DirecTV and DSL cable (about 6 megabits) to YTV with a cable 100 megabit connection (with 1 TB cap before extra charges kick in).

My mom likes to have 2-3 TVs on in the house during the day (she goes back and forth from room to room doing things) and usually will ABC on one TV, Madame Secretary (streamed via Netflix) on another and then something else on the 3rd TV. I've tried to tell her not to keep TVs on in rooms when she's not actively watching, but she's 72 and set in her ways, so it is what it is.

Now that Virtual Channels are a thing, I'm going to setup a channel that pulls Madame Secretary from a local HD vs. streaming as that will help with the bandwidth. I'm also going to try and get an antenna setup so that I can turn off ABC from YTV and just pull from the local OTA. It's a stretch though as signals in the mountains are a challenge and not always consistent and she's all about "I just want it to work".

I have a mix of wifi and wired devices (most TVs are through Wifi, I have a Snynology Mesh Wifi setup in the house). Currently I have a Raspberry PI I installed and played around with over thanksgiving, which has an external 5GB USB 3 drive attached. I included Pluto Docker, but thinking of removing as the only thing she found interesting was the 007 Channel which appears to be gone now. I also suspect it was eating up a lot of the total monthly bandwidth as we went over in November/December when we were only there for about 2 weeks.

All of the above to give you more insight into my question. I have an extra Nvidia Shield that I am considering installing. The Raspberry PI is headless and connected via wired Ethernet to the router (sitting right next to it). If I wanted to go the NVidia route, I would likely need to install either at a TV and run a wire, or same place as the Raspberry PI if it can be run headless (I don't know the answer to that). Running a wire to the TV isn't a huge deal.

I would say before the 9.0 fiasco, I was thinking Shield may be the better route to go, and have seen that it appears a fix has been uploaded, but for those of you that have played more with the hardware than I have, what's the recommendation on setting up something that my mom doesn't have to worry about (I only get there about 3 times a year to work on things, so need it to be very rock solid).

Thanks for any input and/or suggestions.

Jay

#2

Assuming you are referring to a server device.
Pi for sure is 100% more rock solid than the Nvidia Shield.
u do not have to worry about the Android TV OS and its terrible updates and terrible management by Nvidia and Google and all the other background apps and services running.

The Pi and the Channels DVR image is a stripped down OS based on Home Assistant, a rock solid OS. It only has running the things needed for Channels DVR. Only has 2 update buttons in its management UI, for the OS image, and the server. Far less complicated, far less that can break or go wrong, = higher reliability and stability.

Nvidia Shield is not really designed to run "headless". it is a streaming box by design.
I do not know of a way you can remote into it to mange it should you need to, of it it pops up some thing requiring user input, no tv connected to it, you would never know.

My suggestion, use Pi as server, and Shield as client (viewer) device only.

1 Like
#3

Makes sense. The other option is to pickup a Synology NAS but not sure she needs that much hardware. I'll keep plugging away at the Pi

#4

The only downside of PI is the commercial skipping process is very slow so it is a long time after a recording is completed till you can watch with automatically skipped commercials.

#5

That depends on if OTA or TVE.
And, some TVE channels are now instant, with the new Commercial Skip detection system that takes no resources.

#6

A couple other things to consider since it's remote.
You may want to use a UPS for the server and peripherals if the location experiences power outages and ensure the UPS and Server will restart when power is restored.
Also remote access to the server may be a consideration.

#7

Similarly, the pi uses ~50% the wattage of the shield. Neither are hogs, but something to keep in mind if a UPS in future.

#8

Good suggestions. Need to setup a VPN on the Synology router so that I can login from my phone. UPS is a good suggestion as well, there are power spikes there more than the average household.