Nvidia shield

I've been thinking about getting one of the Nvidia shield consoles for a while now.  The little console that could if you will, the home media server version has my eye because I can run plex on it and 500gb of storage gives you room for quite a few movies (assuming you've optimized them a bit), and from what I'm reading the newest version of shield experience lets you add libraries from SMB network shares, usb drives and micro sd cards.  This is great news and I'm saving my bloggy dollars as we speak to get one (half way there!).

That was enough to get my interest for sure, I've been running kodi via the Openelec on an old Acer Aspire revo r1600 (it's a ridiculous product name). It's a crappy nettop atom based pc with the one redeeming quality of having the nvidia ion chipset on it. Nvidia ion was h264 (the standard for .mp4 video) processing.  Meaning the dual core atom processor circa 2009 is able to playback 1080p video without stuttering.  The cpu alone wouldn't be up to the task, and topping out at like 19w it is tiny and only needs an hdmi to be a full featured media center.  Out of the box openelec supported my Media Center usb ir adapter and I can run it with the Logitech Harmony remote and from the xbox 360.  Keeping a keyboard handy is still worth the effort as I've been having some trouble with my usb wifi adapter lately, but otherwise it runs easily.  Kodi doesn't support streaming and transcoding out of the box and doesn't have the fit and polish of Plex, so I've been wanting to jump to that as my full time media player.  Simplifies all kinds of tasks for content on the go and for kids in the house on tablets. 

The final push for me to want the shield was plex had a lifetime plex pass sale recently, $75 for apps, and early access to features and the ability to back up your phones pictures to your media server was too good of a deal.  After I bought my subscription I found a video on running emulators for classic games on the Shield too. We still have our old Nintendo and Super NES, but I never got a N64 and I really miss classic Mario Kart.  The new ones don't have the same soul... So I'm not encouraging anyone to look for the app called happychick on a .hk based website that would allow you to play emulators on your android device, but if you did do those things you might look at this really cool bluetooth gaming controller that works really well with the emulator (allegedly) 

finally, full disclosure.