NVIDIA SHIELD Console Update Brings Plex Media Server And Netflix HDR Goodness

We first brought you news about NVIDIA’s SHIELD Experience Upgrade 3.2 back in May, and the company just started pushing the update out to customers this week. As we’ve reported in the past, the SHIELD Experience Upgrade 3.2 brings with it a number of new features including YouTube 4K60 playback and support for HDR videos in the Netflix app.

Other niceties include new available apps like VUDU (also with support for 4K), Spotify, WatchESPN, Disney Channel, Disney Junior, CNN Go, and Comedy Central. You’ll also find Dolby Atmos surround sound pass-through, drag-and-drop file sharing with Macs and PCs, the ability to mount a NAS device and a gaggle of monthly security updates.

But perhaps the biggest addition to the SHIELD is the arrival of the Plex Media Server (first announced earlier this month), which makes streaming media content to your televisions and mobile devices (inside and outside the home) a breeze. You’ll have support for hardware-accelerated video transcoding (H.264, MPEG2 and HEVC) thanks to the onboard GeForce GPU and support for simultaneous streams (two or three streams should be perfectly serviceable, but don’t think you’ll be able to get away with letting all of your friend and family connect to your server at once).

The NVIDIA SHIELD Pro with its built 500GB hard drive should have more than enough space to handle a small media library. Those with a base SHIELD (which has just 16GB of storage) will probably want to add an external hard drive or microSD card to give you a bit more breathing room. And there’s always a NAS solution, which can be enabled in the storage settings on the console.

We’ve been playing around with the SHIELD Experience Upgrade 3.2 on a SHIELD Pro for the past few days and so far, it’s handled everything we could possibly throw at it. We’ll have our detailed thought on the Plex Media Server on SHIELD very shortly.