Since my last post on the topic, my client and server software have changed. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I now work part time for Plex, though all of my decisions outlined in this post were made before that time.
Necessity for the change
I started to get frustrated with some of the limitations of the GoogleTV:
- The platform seemed to become stagnate (and the pending AndroidTV hadn’t been announced yet). It became clear that some of the limitations were never going to be resolved.
- The device is supposed to passthrough DTS, but it will occasionally fail for a second during playback. It does this both on optical and HDMI. I tended to resolved this by transcoding the DTS to AC3 with the more problematic movies.
- The device is supposed to play VC-1, but it would stutter during playback if the content was in an MKV file. It did not if the content was in a MPEG-TS. This problem does not exist during disk playback. I resorted to transcoding VC-1 content to AVC.
- The device is supposed to passthrough HD-audio such as DTS-HD and TrueHD. It does this with playback of a disk, but not from MKV files nor MPEG-TS.
Clearly the best solution is a computer since it has no problem with all of these.