

Tech companies have long pushed to outsource much of this computing into the cloud. Plex’s usage of the NVIDIA Shield as a home media server also goes to show that there is still some demand for processor-intensive computing in the living room.

“We’ll continue to evaluate other platforms,” the Plex team said in a blog post Thursday. That’s a significant step forward for Plex, even if the number of Nvidia Shield owners who can take advantage of this are likely limited.īut the fact that Plex could turn the Shield into a streaming server that can send audio and video on demand to your phone or tablet suggests that the startup may be able to extend this kind of technology to additional devices in the future. Nvidia has started a support forum thread to collect reports of which apps do not work on Android 11 that were working on previous updates.The NVIDIA Shield is so powerful that it can run both the server software and a playback engine for 4K videos at the same time. Third-party launchers also appear to be broken following this update, requiring a factory reset to be fixed. On one Reddit thread, some users report issues with HDMI CEC, “stuttering” video in HBO Max, Disney+, and Netflix, and some lag issues in other apps. Notably, there appear to be some lesser issues beyond just storage-related problems. Unfortunately, nothing was shared on the timeline for a potential fix, but some users have reported that a factory reset seems to solve the problem. A Plex employee shared on the company’s forums that there “appears to be an issue” accessing external storage on the Android 11 update for Shield. In the case of Plex, it seems these storage issues are the root cause of the issue, but specifically with Scoped Storage blocking access to external storage devices. Nvidia has a support page that explains what Shield owners need to do to avoid this issue, but the process doesn’t appear to solve the problem for all apps. “Scoped Storage” requires apps to use storage folders differently, and this often requires the app to be updated to handle these new guidelines appropriately. Many of the issues reported by users can be chalked up to the storage changes Google made in Android 11. Since the Android TV 11 update started rolling out to Shield TV owners last week, quite a few Reddit threads have shown up with users complaining that some apps no longer work properly. However, it seems that Android 11 update is breaking Plex servers and causing other issues for some Shield TV owners. The Nvidia Shield TV is perhaps the single best-supported Android device of all time, with models from 2015 and on getting updated to Android 11 earlier this month.
