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The Ultimate 2021 BEST Plex Client Showdown!

Jun 08, 2021
This is the

ultimate

Plex

client

showdown

of 2020. That's right, it may have taken me four months to make, but it's finally here, so in today's video let's dive into which is the

best

Plex

client

of

2021

that you can buy before move on to this. video I want to say that if you use a VPN service and have not tried private internet access, my discount codes, like everyone else on the internet, will give you a discount. The difference here is that my links are compatible with my channel. I really appreciate it, you get a 30 day money back guarantee and I can tell you from personal experience that it's actually pretty fast and super usable if you're trying to use it, you know certain programs with unraid, not that I know anything about it, i'm just saying it works what's up youtube jason here with bitmybits and in today's video i'm going to touch base on some of the most popular

plex

clients available today.
the ultimate 2021 best plex client showdown
These clients are from March

2021

and a little heads up, I'm not covering all the clients out there, I basically picked some of the

best

ones that were available and here we are so the

plex

client

showdown

2021 is officially here and everything is off from this server just nook now yes, Simplynuck sent this to free for a previous video, but since it's embarrassing to say it's faster than my main server and loaded with SSD and pretty much a damn Rockstar Plex server all in one, I ended up using this to do everything. from my tests because it's faster than my server, I'll link this in the description below if you want to check it out, it's just one of those things that you just buy it and it works, it's super fast and it's hard to ignore, you spend a little money on it but damn it's fast and of course I'm part of a monthly sponsorship through plex so thank you plex for sponsoring my channel, with all that out of the way let's get straight to the testing parameters. or the files I'm going to use today to test all these great plex clients.
the ultimate 2021 best plex client showdown

More Interesting Facts About,

the ultimate 2021 best plex client showdown...

In today's test, I'm reviewing the latest and greatest Apple TV, the new version of the nvidia Shield Pro that has a bit of a different twist. remote and I love it, but also more powerful is the roku 4k ultra, the new chromecast that doesn't actually need you to send anything to it, it just has everything integrated, so this time I'm trying it, the most important thing that Amazon offers. has to offer, what is the Fire Cube. They now have many different flavors of Fire TV. There is this regular Fire TV. The Fire TV Cube. The Fire TV Stick, but I decided to try the cube.
the ultimate 2021 best plex client showdown
I wanted the best they had. offer and that was the bucket and due to popular demand I checked my box, which is my box. I'm only going to save my box if it's me. My box is bad, but I say my box and because someone randomly recommended it. 4k streaming I didn't know this existed, but apparently it does so it's not in today's video. It's a super budget. Now many of my test files will be linked in the description below. Mainly they will be like Jellyfish files with different bit rates ranging from 10 megabits per second up to 400 megabits per second in both 1080 and 4k variations and h.264 and h.265 again links in the description if you want to try these files on your own servers I also used an Imax demo trailer, I think it's for the Avengers, super high quality, high resolution, got all the surround sound, I mean it's just a really robust file.
the ultimate 2021 best plex client showdown
I used the Adobe Vision test video file again. Links in description. I found a set of atmos surround sound files online that I also use for my tests today and of course I went to the tried and true back to the future, except this time I also have back to the future in 4k with surround sound, you know , and all that interesting stuff. Now, a lot of the scoring I'm doing today is going to be based on the performance of just the complex part of these clients. I'm not testing every aspect of every client. I'm just testing the Plex app within clients. from the remote, but you know, that's because of the remote and because I'm testing performance.
Yes, most of the scoring will come from performance results, basically saying I'm testing seven different devices today, so any test I run at the high end gets seven points. the lower end gets one point, so if a device comes in second place it gets six points, if it comes in third place it gets five points. I think you see where I'm going. I also did some compatibility testing with Jellyfish files and some audio files. and some extra features you know will add a few more points in the long run, so with all that out of the way, let's jump right into the first test, which is launching the Plex app and how fast it is.
This was my first test and honestly it was a complete surprise because the tivo stream box came in first place starting with the plex in just 4.16 seconds. Holy bananas, right behind it was the shield with 4.28 seconds and the apple with 4.36 seconds. I really didn't expect Tevo to actually come out with any type. fight anywhere, but you know, hey, from the beginning, well, now, my box is super budget and I never really wanted to try it before, but people said I should go in dead the last 24 seconds 24, that was painful , so Now that I'm in plex, I'm going to move on to my second performance test measurement, which is scrolling through movie posters when you're trying to find something to watch.
For me, this is one of the most important things: how fast can you move? do the poster arts load and you know if it's going to be jumping or it's going to be glitchy or it's just going to get away from you and it's going to bring my second kind of surprise because holy shit, Apple TV absolutely dominated every customer here like by To a large extent, the The way I measured this was from the beginning of the movie list, which is about 550 movies that I put on this little nuck server to the end, how long did it take to go down and did Apple TV do it? 7.57 seconds, shit, it was just soft, since I don't know a baby's butt, like what's softer than a baby's butt, wait, I don't even know if you can say baby's butt, like I'm sure that someone was offended by that, the runner.
Above was the Nvidia shield. I was hoping for video shield to take first place but instead it took 17 seconds to make it to the bottom of the movie list, however the worst performer here was tivo and I can tell you it was absolutely terrible and I never want to experience that again in my life. 0 out of 10 I don't recommend 50 seconds I mean you hit the apple seven seconds seven and a half seconds to get to the bottom the tivo 50 seconds wow Okay, I found the movie I want to watch and let's say I want to watch a movie in 4k.
The following tests are about how fast I can load the 4k file as a direct playback, not as a transcoding stream. Yes, the knuckle is powerful. It has super robust hardware acceleration built in, it's 10th gen and all that, but I don't need it. Instead, I rely on SSDs as the storage is fast and will hopefully allow me to load movies as quickly as possible. so I'm using the back to the future 4k file and I decided it because of the way the tests went and the way the movie starts and the way the customers sometimes start and then pause before them like if it was a bit strange, so I decided to test all the way through the Back to the Future logo loads, even though this greatly inflated the load times, this allowed me to measure an accurate load time for each individual client and With all that said, Nvidia Shield came in first place. with a load time of 33.28 seconds, in second place is the Apple TV with 37 seconds and at the back is the Google Chromecast with 44.5 seconds, which is honestly something to consider, I mean, There's only a 10-second gap between the top of the line. the most expensive device you can buy to almost the cheapest device you can buy, you know the tivo loaded it surprisingly faster than the chromecast and the tivo is cheaper, but hey, scrolling through your movies is one thing, starting a file of 4k video and something else, but you know what really counts, fast forwarding through a movie file, yes, that's important too, so for my next test, because it was a difficult thing to measure logically, I had to observe things, but as always I'll put this on your screen so you can judge for yourself, basically what I wanted to do was jump back and forth in a movie with a 4k video file.
Now keep in mind that some of these clients have Ethernet, some of them only have Wi-Fi, however I tested two out of three. Of the devices that have ethernet with wi-fi to see if there was any difference and there wasn't, they all acted the same, so during my testing I had the nvidia shield running without wi-fi, I had the Apple TV running without ethernet and I had the roku running from ethernet and based on just looking at the results here, the Apple TV and the nvidia Shield were neck and neck for number one, but I had to give it to Apple because it was a little softer. a little more responsive a little faster when I fast forwarded through the movie the nvidia shield had a little longer lag which forced me to switch it to ethernet that's why I said it made no difference because I switched it over ethernet and it didn't make any difference, but I wanted the nvidia shield to win, so I had to change it.
I know I'm trying to be biased here but I really like the nvidia shield but Apple still took the win here with the nvidia shield coming in second and this is where things get a little tricky because I had to label everything from the one through seven, I had to give each customer their little spot, but it was extremely difficult to get third place because the Roku the cube and the Chromecast sucked equally, you know they're just very small differences and you know that made me choose which one was for on top of each other, but I really just wanted to give everyone third or fifth place, but since I'm writing this down obviously that's not fair, I glued my eyes to the screen and try to choose whatever would put them in front of each other, so what we have is roku and third the cube, fire cube fourth and chromecast fifth, now my Box got six and Tebow got seven but again they were both so terrible I feel like they should have gotten zeros or at least tie for seventh place, you know, maybe split a point, I don't know, but still the scoring system is a scoring system and the my box barely squeaked forward like barely now if you're keeping track of these tests on Right now the Apple TV and the nvidia Shield are tied with 25 points, the Amazon Fire TV Cube has 16, the Roku has 15, surprisingly in some ways the Tebow has 13 the Chromecast has 10 and my box is at the bottom with eight points.
I really thought the tivo thing was going to be at the bottom, but you know, that's what these tests are for now, to read the results of these tests. I'm going to use my phone just because I took pictures of the graph I made basically, the way I'm grading this is that for everything the device can do it gets a single point, if every device can do said thing then no one gets a point, you'll see why here in a second, but for my first round of testing I wanted to talk about remotes and go over some of the features of remotes, such as having the lights off, in all of my testing, the Shield TV was the only one that had lights on, I know I didn't realize that in my last video, thanks to hundreds of people who told me yes, I had the activator I don't know why, but I discovered it a little slow, but I got it , another feature is to find your remote, so in case you lose it, you can always go to your client and basically ping your remote and then it will help you find it, which I thought was a very cool feature and definitely deserved one point now. all remotes had volume control all remotes could fast forward to rewind with a single button even though apple does it in a weird way i'm not going to go there yet and a mute button is another example not all they had a mute button, you might have playback paused but no mute or voice control, it sucks when you're typing on the little keyboard trying to type something, it's much better to be able to hold or press a button and and give your voice and actually dictate it correctly so not everyone got a point for that but most did one thing that I found unique is that every device and in one way or another had an option to be controlled with an app of phone, yes, some are Android Apple, etc., but you have options for all of them, which I thought was great, so the Shield TV and Roku Ultra got an extra five points for the features their remotes have, so The next set of tests here are actually direct playback support, so what I did was that with eachdevice I forced direct playback and tried the Jellyfish files along with the Back to the Future 4k file and a Dolby Vision file and the Imax trailer, I basically wanted to see which one.
The devices could play directly and were not required to transcode the video now with all the 1080p jellyfish files and the Back to the Future video file in 4k, every customer was able to play it directly without any issues. That's when I got into Dolby Vision. imax trailer and the ridiculous super high bitrate 4k video files where we started to see a bit of a difference now the pro shield was able to put up a couple of points here because it somehow magically played the 200 megabit video file per second, but really aside from that, most people only got points for the vision file, that's really, the Apple TV almost got a ton of points for directly playing those jellyfish files because, technically speaking, it was played directly almost all the jellyfish, I mean we're talking 100 200 300 400 megabits per second, they played all those files directly without transcoding, the problem was they didn't always play, it was like a slideshow, so I didn't count them.
As you know, actually playing those files was over Ethernet, there was no way to increase the server speed or anything, it's just a little choked, but I tried playing it directly, so that's interesting, so next on my The list of things I wanted to test is audio because audio is so important that I really wanted to play around with this with a few different test files. Now there is the old set of test files, like dts hd mma 7.1 5.1 pcm 7.1, but I also added some Atmos test files that go with 5.1 7.1 9.1 actually I didn't test the 9.1 but you know, I tried the real 7.1 and because because the shield supports literally everything and is the only one that has a true pass through to your the receiver got all the points, the tivo surprisingly got the second most points, four, it's crazy, this surprised me a little, but there is a big difference between what a device can handle and what a program can handle, to give an example with some of the android boxes you can install kodi and then install the plex addon and get more audio support even if the hardware on yes you are physically capable of handling some of these, it really depends on the application and in this case you know the plex application.
I couldn't hit all cylinders on all clients, but hey, Shield TV handles all the things, does all the things, it's just that you know, without a doubt, like your home theater friend. That's, I mean, that's the truth, it's your home theater friend and the. The last thing I wanted to cover in my test is just some extra things that people have asked me about before and that's things like subtitles. Now the only client here that forced me to record subtitles was the Roku that I tried and it didn't. I know why, for some reason Roku just forced subtitles to be recorded, it wouldn't handle them natively, but everything else was able to load the subtitles and it didn't put any additional stress on the server other than just providing those subtitles.
The next point is literally just for the shield. because it has AI enhancement, I didn't try it, it's just a feature that makes everything a little better. I didn't compare it side by side, it's just a feature that they have, it's a feature that people use and people asked me to talk about it. I could talk about that in a different video, maybe not, but it's a feature, so it has a point and lastly, because it's important because not all devices have an Ethernet port, the Shield has it, the Roku has it. It has and the Apple TV.
I thought it was important to give each of those customers a point because it's still a feature, it's a very useful feature. I love Ethernet, so here we go with all that testing, we finally have our 2021 plex client showdown winners or Let's start with the losers, which is my box, which scored a total of nine points. characteristics and a little difficult, you know, the Tivo somehow surprisingly came from the last place with 19 points. Very surprising, it almost caught up with the fire cube that only had 20 points. It's really sadder for the fire cube than happy for the tivo now.
The Roku 4K Ultra came in third with 24 points, followed by the Apple TV 4K with 27 points and of course you've probably already guessed the first place winner by a wide margin due to all the things it supports and pretty much the audio, the nvidia shield. pro 37 points mastering so many different factors but losing terribly when it comes to scrolling through the art of the film. I'm still impressed by that, seriously, shit, don't tell me you didn't see that coming, I mean the nvidia shield. it handles so much audio, it's crazy if you're an enthusiast, you want to see and get the most out of your video files, you want the hdr, you want the compatibility, you want the surround sound you want, I mean yeah it's 200 but it's worth it . best experience, you can save 20 bucks and get an Apple TV if you want, you know, maybe a home kit hub at home, which is literally what mine is going to do for the rest of its life because I don't want to go back to never use that thing again. because i absolutely hate the remote, i wish it was here so i could destroy it, but in the future nvidia shield will be my main customer.
If you want to see this, check out the links in the description below and lastly, especially because I'm bouncing all over the place, the Netflix button on this I downloaded the remapper. I discovered that it wasn't that difficult. Everyone in the comments said you could remap the button. I want to have a small black sticker. like a plex sticker for this and I just put plex on it because I remapped it to plex so that's cool so happy about that now that this lights up I can find it with this if I lose it and I can easily press the plex button. it's just without a doubt, this is, this is me for the next 10 years, well guys, as always, if you have any questions, comments or want to tell me everything I did wrong, be sure to leave them in the comments below.
I definitely appreciate it. Guys watching, please like and subscribe and have a great day.

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