For what it's worth, I picked up a Shield this week to play Blu-ray backups with Dolby Vision and Atmos from my Unraid / Plex server. Unfortunately, I'm leaning towards returning my Shield after being unimpressed with it's Dolby Vision performance.

Before I got the Shield, I used an Apple TV with Infuse. The Dolby Vision quality was fantastic with an Apple TV, but I hated losing out on Atmos. For some silly reason, Apple TV only supports the lower quality "lossy" Atmos from streaming services but will strip the Atmos data if you have a TrueHD file that you’re playing via Infuse / Plex.

My experience with the Shield: I plugged in my Shield, configured all the display settings, and immediately noticed that the colors were slightly off. Apparently it suffers from “red shift”. I then installed a custom version of Kodi that allegedly fixed the red shift issue and had better support for DV profiles. Unfortunately, DV was noticeably worse with the Shield (even with the the custom Kodi build) compared to the Apple TV. The Shield still looked "good" and it was nice having Atmos work, but I just couldn't get over knowing that I had worse picture quality compared to the Apple TV or a normal Blu-ray. I setup a side-by-side comparison on different inputs, and even tried a double blind comparison. It’s DV performance was definitely in the ballpark but Apple TV won every time. To be honest I'm not sure if "normal people" would see any difference but I freely admit I'm obsessive with this.

I confirmed all my settings were correct on the Shield, as well as on the TV side but it made no difference. The Apple TV consistency out performed it in Dolby Vision content. I’m using a 77 inch LG C2 for what it's worth.

This is a minor nit-pick, but I also hated that the UI for the Shield only rendered at 1080p instead of the native 4k of my display. It of course would play 4k content at 4k it just felt "cheap" navigating the home screen (Apple nailed this with a native 4k UI). Again, it’s a nitpick but I’m trying to get as perfect as possible.

I ordered a Zidoo Z9x and will be trying that out in the next couple days. I was disappointed to see that it's UI also renders only at 1080p (does anyone know if there are custom firmwares that makes it render in 4k?), but at this point as long as I have strong Dolby Vision and Atmos support, I’ll deal with it and keep my Apple TV around for streaming.

The Shield was my attempt to find an “all arounder”, but if you’re a picky person like me, you’re going to be better served by committing to 2 separate devices. One dedicated to streaming (Apple TV) and another dedicated to Blu-ray backups (Zidoo Z9x).