Getting Plex to Direct Play on the NVIDIA SHIELD.
The NVIDIA SHIELD is one of the best Plex clients available. It can easily direct play most media. Use this guide to ensure your settings are all correct.
This guide was updated for the release of Plex’s “UNO” UI.
From the home screen of the Plex app, click your username in the top left hand corner.
After clicking on your username you will see the “Settings” menu appear. Simply click again to enter.
Once in the “Settings” menu, you will need to scroll down to the “Video Quality” settings. There you will want to make the following changes:
- Adjust automatically – OFF
- Home streaming – Maximum
- Remote streaming – Maximum
- Play smaller videos at original quality – ON
The last setting you’ll need to change is “Audio Quality”. It needs to be set to “Original”. The SHIELD is one of the few clients that has this particular audio setting. In testing, it appeared to help Direct Play media in some cases.
By matching the settings above, your SHIELD should direct play media from your Plex server. While direct play provides the best quality and is more efficient on the server side, it does use more bandwidth than transcoding. If you find that your internet connection isn’t quite keeping up, then you should start dropping the settings from “Maximum” until you find one that your connection can handle.
