Which Smart TV dongle?

Soldato
Joined
17 Jul 2008
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7,458
I have a reasonable 65" oled TV but it does not get c4, and Netflix crashes from time to time.. As well as the ui being so slow..

Is there a best hdmi plug in dongle? Should I just get an amazon fire stick?

Willing to spend a bit more if it's fast (and good)
 
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Depends on what your are interested in putting on it. Just be aware that any 'extra curricular activities' you may want to side load are not going to be possible for much longer on a firestick, if the Vegas OS roll out becomes wider. Just upgraded my 4k Chromecast with Google TV to the new Google Streamer. Seems to work well for me. It's much snappier then the older model it's replaced.
 
I'm not sure how popular this suggestion will be as the device itself is very dated, but I recently got an Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 model. Despite its age, Nvidia are for some reason continually supporting it, and it's still getting bug fixes and patches to this day, while running on Android 11.

It will handle any Android/streaming app with ease, and even though it is dated, it has a relatively beefy SoC, so it can handle more interesting things; I set up Moonlight and Sunshine to be able to do streaming gaming from my Steam library. The game launches/plays on the PC, but it streams to your TV. It's pretty neat.

I'm also in the middle of setting up Retroarch on it, and it played SNES and PS1 games fine, so you can get a bit of retro gaming action in locally on the device if that's your thing.
 
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Firestick 4K or 4K max, they go on offer often , 4K drops to £25-£30, I'd stay away from the select even without sideloading it's got other limitations
 
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I'm not sure how popular this suggestion will be as the device itself is very dated, but I recently got an Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 model. Despite its age, Nvidia are still for some reason actively supporting it, and it's still getting bug fixes patches to this day, despite running on Android 11.

It will handle any Android/streaming app with ease, and even though it is dated, it still has a relatively beefy SoC, so it can handle more interesting things; I set up Moonlight and Sunshine to be able to do streaming gaming from my Steam library. The game launches/plays on the PC, but it streams to your TV. It's pretty neat.

I'm also in the middle of setting up Retroarch on it, and it played SNES and PS1 games fine, so you can get a bit of retro gaming action in locally on the device if that's your thing.
I have one of the Nvidia Shield cylinder version, by far my favourite streaming device.
 
Have had a Roku streaming stick for a number of months now, has been really good, is powered via a USB port on the TV and only cost £30. The TV had a very limited number of apps due to being Firefox OS, so this has filled the void. The only downside is it's 1080p, but that's fine for me.
 
Nvidia shield doesn't get C4 also doesn't support HDR in iPlayer and no HLG HDR support, for purely streaming I think firestick 4K is hard to beat especially when it's on offer pretty much has all streaming apps natively supported

I had the Nvidia shield before with my usage purely streaming I prefer the firestick 4K max
 
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I have a few Google Chromecast 4Ks

I think they just released yet another version.

I have zero issues with them. I'm already heavily invested in Google stuff so it'sy natural choice.

It'll be a 3 way toss up between Apple, Google, Amazon.

Who's your favourite multi billionaire corporate overlord?

:p

Google's offerings are very expensive in comparison it seems.
 
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