The Ultimate 2021 BEST Plex Client Showdown!

this is the ultimate plex client showdown of 2020 one that's right it may it took me four months to get this done but it's finally here so in today's video let's dive into what the best 2021 plex client is that you can buy [Music] before i jump into this video i do want to say that if you do use a vpn service and you haven't tried private internet access my discount codes just like everybody else's on the internet will give you a discount the difference here is that my links does support my channel i greatly appreciate it you get a 30 day money back guarantee and i can tell you from personal experience it's actually pretty quick and super usable if you're trying to use you know certain software's with unraid not that i know anything about that i'm just saying it works what's up youtube jason here with bitemybits and in today's video i'm going to be touching base on some of the most popular plex clients out there available today now these clients are as of march 2021 and a little heads up i'm not covering every single client out there i just basically picked some of the best ones that were available and here we are so the plex client 2021 showdown is officially here and it is all powered off of this simply nook server now yes simplynuck did send this to me for free for a previous video but because as embarrassing as it is to say it is faster than my main server and loaded with ssds and pretty much just an all-in-one freaking rockstar plex server i ended up using this thing to do all of my testing because it's faster than my server i will link to this thing in the description down below if you guys want to check it out it is just one of those things that's like you just buy it and it works and it's super fast and it's hard to ignore you spend a little money on it but holy crap it's just fast and of course i am 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 right into the testing parameters or the files that i'm going to be using today to test all of these magnificent plex clients in today's test i'm checking out the latest and greatest apple tv the new version of the nvidia shield pro that has a little bit of a different remote and i totally love it but also more powerful the roku 4k ultra the new chromecast that doesn't actually need you to cast anything to it it just has kind of everything built in so i'm testing it this time the biggest thing that amazon has to offer which is the fire cube now they have a lot of different flavors of fire tvs out there there's this regular fire tv the fire tv cube the fire tv stick but i decided to just test the cube i wanted the best that they had the offer and that was the cube and due to popular demand i checked out the my box which it's mi box i'm just gonna save my box if it's me box my bad but i'm saying my box and because somebody randomly recommended it a tivo 4k streaming i did not know this was a thing but it is apparently a thing so it isn't in today's video it's super budget now a lot of my test files will be linked in the description down below they're primarily going to be like jellyfish different bitrate files that range anywhere from 10 megabits per second all the way up to 400 megabits per second both in 1080 and 4k variations and h.264 and h.265 again links in the description if you want to test 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 i mean it's just a just a really beefy file i used adobe vision test video file again links in the description i found a set of atmos surround sound files online that i also use for my testing today and of course i went to the tried and true back to the future except for this time i also have back to the future in 4k with surround sound you know and all that neat stuff now a lot of the scoring that i'm doing today is going to be based off performance of just the plex portion of these clients i'm not testing every single aspect of each client i'm only testing the plex app within the clients aside from the remote but you know that's because remote and because i am testing the performance yes a bulk of the score will come from the performance results basically saying i am testing seven different devices today so whatever test that i run the top end gets seven points the bottom 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 here i also did some compatibility tests with the jellyfish files some audio files and some you know additional features that 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 starting the plex app and how fast is it now this was my first test and honestly a complete surprise because the tivo stream box came in first place starting plex in a mere 4.16 seconds holy bananas right behind it was the shield at 4.28 seconds and the apple at 4.36 seconds i really just did not expect tevo to really put up any kind of fight anywhere but uh you know hey right out the gate good going tivo now the me box a super budget and i've really never wanted to test it before but people said i should came in dead last 24 seconds 24 that's it was painful so now that i am into plex i'm moving on to my second performance testing measurement which is scrolling through movie posters when you're trying to find something to watch this to me is one of the most important things how fast can you scroll how fast do the the poster arts load and you know is it going to be jumping around or glitchy or just kind of wigging out on you and bring on my second kind of sort of surprise because holy crap the apple tv absolutely dominated every single client here like by a lot 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 all the way down to the bottom how long did it take to get down and the apple tv did it in 7.57 seconds holy crap it was just smooth as i don't know a baby's butt like what's what's smoother than a baby's butt wait i don't even know if you can say baby butt like i'm sure somebody's offended by that the runner-up was the nvidia shield i kind of sort of hoped that the video shield would be first place but instead it got 17 seconds to get all the way to the bottom of the movie list however the worst performer here was the tivo and i can tell you it was just absolutely terrible and i never want to experience that again in my life like 0 out of 10 do not recommend 50 seconds i mean you got the apple right seven seconds seven and a half seconds to get to the bottom the tivo 50 seconds wow okay so i found the movie that i want to watch and let's say i want to watch a 4k movie these following tests are all about how fast can i load the 4k file as a direct play not as a transcoding stream yes the knuck is powerful it's got super beefy like hardware acceleration built into it's got a 10th gen and all that but i don't need that instead i'm relying on the ssds that storage is quick and it's going to allow me hopefully to load the movies as fast as possible so i'm using the 4k back to the future file and i decided because of the way the testing was going and the way the movie starts and the way that clients sometimes start and then pause before them like it was kind of weird so i decided to test all the way into the very end of the back to the future logo loads even though this heavily inflated the loading times this allowed me to gauge an accurate loading time for each individual client and with all that said the nvidia shield came in first place with 33.28 seconds load time coming up in second place is the apple tv at 37 seconds and carrying up the rear is the google chromecast at 44.5 seconds which honestly is something to note i mean that's only in 10 seconds difference between the top of the line like most expensive device you can buy to almost the cheapest device you could buy you know the tivo surprisingly loaded it faster than the chromecast did and the tivo is cheaper but hey scrolling through your movies that's one thing starting a 4k video file that's another thing but you know what really counts fast forwarding through a movie file yeah that's kind of important too so for my next test because it was somewhat difficult to measure logically i kind of had to eyeball things but as always i will put this on your screen so you can kinda sorta judge for yourself basically what i wanted to do was skip back and forth in a movie with a 4k video file now bear in mind that some of these clients have ethernet some of them only have wi-fi however i did test two out of three of the devices that have ethernet with wi-fi to see if there was any difference and there was not they all acted the same so during my testing i had the nvidia shield running off of wi-fi i had the apple tv running off of ethernet and i had the roku running off of ethernet and based off just me eyeballing the results here the apple tv and the nvidia shield were kind of neck and neck for number one but i had to give it to apple because it was just a little bit smoother a little bit more responsive a little bit quicker when i fast forwarded in the movie the nvidia shield did have a little bit longer of a delay which forced me to switch it over to ethernet which is why i said it didn't make a difference because i switched it over the ethernet and it did not make a difference but i kind of wanted nvidia shield to win so i had to switch it i know i'm trying to be impartial here but i really like the nvidia shield but still apple took the win here with the nvidia shield coming in second and here's where things kind of get dicey because i had to label everything one through seven i had to give each client their own little place but it was extremely hard to get third place because the roku the cube and the chromecast all kind of sucked equally you know they're just very minor differences and you know that made me pick which one was above the other but i really just wanted to give them all third place or fifth place but since i am scoring this that's obviously not fair i glued my eyes to the screen and i try to pick out anything that would put one in front of the other so what we have is roku and third the cube the fire cube in fourth and the chromecast in fifth now the my box got six and the tebow got seven but again they were both so terrible i feel like they should have got zeros or at least tied for seventh you know maybe split a point i don't know but still scoring system is a scoring system and the my box just barely screeched ahead like just just barely now if you are keeping track from just these tests 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 somehow the tebow has 13 the chromecast has 10 and the my box is sitting at the bottom with eight points i really thought that tivo thing was going to be at the bottom but you know hey that's what these tests are for now to read off these test results i'm going to be using my phone just because i took pictures of the graph that i made basically the way i'm scoring this is that for everything that the device can do it gets a single point if every single device can do said thing then nobody gets a point you'll see why here in a second but for my first round of tests i wanted to talk about the remotes and go through some of the features of the remotes like for example having lights out of all my tests the shield tv was the only one that had lights on it i know that i didn't realize that in my last video thank you hundreds of people who told me it did i had the setting off don't know why but i figured it out a little slow but i got it another feature is find your remote so just in case you lose it you can always go to your client itself and basically ping your remote and then it would help you find it which i thought was a very cool feature and definitely deserved a point now all the remotes had volume control all the remotes could fast forward to rewind with a single button even though the apple does it in a weird way i'm not going to go there yet and a mute button is another example not all of them had a mute button you might have a play in pause but you don't have a mute or voice control it sucks when you're typing on the little keyboard trying to type something in it's way better to be able to hold down or push a button and and give your voice and actually have it dictated correctly so not all of them got a point for that but most of them did one thing that i did find was unique is that every single device and one way or another had an option to be controlled with a phone app yes some are android apple etc but you have options for all of them which i thought was kind of cool so the shield tv and the roku ultra both pulled in five additional points for the features that their remotes have so the next set of testing here is actually direct play compatibility so what i did is that with each device i forced direct play and i tried the jellyfish files along with the back to the future 4k file and a dolby vision file and the imax trailer basically i wanted to see which devices could direct play and were not forced to transcode the video now with all of the 1080p jellyfish files and the back to the future 4k video file every single client was able to direct play it without any problems it's when i got into the dolby vision the imax trailer and the super high bitrate kind of ridiculous bitrate 4k video files where we started to see a little bit of difference now the shield pro was able to bring in a couple points here because it somehow magically played the 200 megabit per second video file but really aside from that mostly people just got points for the vision file that's really it the apple tv almost got a crap ton of points for direct playing those jellyfish files because technically speaking it direct played almost all of the jellyfish i mean we're talking like 100 200 300 400 megabits per second it was playing all of those files directly without transcoding the problem was is that they weren't always playing it was like a slideshow so i didn't count it as you know actually playing those files this was on ethernet there was no way for me to increase the speed to the server or anything like that it's just just kind of choked but it did try to direct play it so that's interesting so next on my list of things that i wanted to try is audio because audio is such a big deal i really wanted to touch base on this with a few different test files now there's the old set of test files things like dts hd mma 7.1 5.1 pcm 7.1 but i also added some atmos testing files that goes 5.1 7.1 9.1 didn't actually test the 9.1 but you get where i'm going i tested the true 7.1 and because the shield supports literally everything and is the only one that has true pass through to your receiver it got all the points the tivo surprisingly got the second amount of points four it's crazy i was a little surprised by this but there's 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 could install kodi and then install the plex plug-in and actually get more audio support even if the hardware itself is physically capable of handling some of these it's just really up to the app and in this case you know the plex app just wasn't able to hit on all cylinders on all clients but hey shield tv handles all the things does all the stuffs it's just you know hands down like your home theater friend that's just i mean that's the truth it is your home theater friend and the last thing that i wanted to cover on my test are just a few extras things that people have asked me about before and that is things like subtitles now the only client here that forced me to burn in subtitles was the roku i tried i don't know why for some reason the roku just forced burning subtitles it would not handle them natively but everything else was able to load the subtitles and not put any additional stress on the server aside from just providing those subtitles the next point is literally just for the shield because it has ai upscaling i did not test it it's just a feature that makes everything just a little bit better i didn't compare side by side it's just a feature they have it's a feature that people use and people requested me to talk about so i might talk about that in like a different video maybe maybe not but it's a feature so it gets a point and lastly because it is important because not all devices have it an ethernet port the shield has it the roku has it and the apple tv has it i thought it was important to give each one of those clients a point because it's still a feature it's a very useful feature i love ethernet so there we go with all those tests out of the way we finally have our 2021 plex client showdown winners or let's start with the losers which is the my box which got a total of nine points really just just kind of swinging miss there the chromecast only got 13 points so it came in second to last again like performance was okay but just not a lot of extra features and just kind of rough you know the tivo somehow surprisingly came in through from last with uh 19 points very surprising it almost caught up with the fire cube which only had 20 points it's really more sad for the fire cube than happy for the tivo now the roku 4k ultra came in third place with 24 points following the apple tv 4k with 27 points and of course you've already probably guessed the first place winner by a large margin because of all the things this supports and pretty much audio the nvidia shield pro 37 points dominating so many different factors but losing terribly when it comes through scrolling through movie art kind of i'm still blown away by that like seriously holy crap don't tell me you didn't see this coming i mean the nvidia shield handles so much audio it's crazy if you are an enthusiast you want to watch 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 yes it's 200 but it's worth it this is the ultimate experience you can save yourself 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 never want to use that thing again because i absolutely hate the remote i wish it was here so i could smash it but moving forward for me the nvidia shield is going to be my primary client if you want to check this out check out the links in the description down below and last but not least since i'm bouncing all over the place the netflix button on this i downloaded the remapper i figured it out it wasn't that hard everyone in the comments said you could do the button remap i want to get like a little black sticker like a plex sticker for this and just put plex on it because i remapped it to plex so that's cool really happy about that now that this thing lights up i can find it with this if i lose it and i can easily hit the plex button this is just hands down this is it this is me for the next 10 years well guys as always if you have any questions comments or want to let me know everything that i did wrong make sure to leave it in the comments down below i definitely appreciate you guys watching like and subscribe and to have yourself a great day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 57,500

Keywords: best plex client, plex player, best plex, plex media server, plex client showdown, roku, shield tv, shield pro, roku ultra, mi box, chromecast, tivo 4k, tivo stream, fire tv, fire cube, review, nvidia shield, plex server, plex media server setup, plex complete walkthrough, plex byte my bits, apple tv

Id: qLxjL2NxZy8

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AGuyAndHisCat]

Wild guess top three are...
Nvidia shield.
Apple TV.
Roku.

[u/mathteacher85]

What is it about the apple tv that allows it to display poster art so damn fast?

[u/xenago]

Well-edited. Nice to see the grid of clients

[u/tomsliwowski]

So picks #1 and #2 are performing faster than the rest...well at 2x the price they better damn well. For the price of one shield pro, I was able to get enough FireTV 4K sticks for every TV in the house.

[u/scubieman]

This is awesome!

[u/itsmegoddamnit]

I can vouch for my Plex for Samsung app as just perfect for most of the stuff described in the video.

[u/Osoroshii]

Starts video rooting for the Nvidia and surprise Nvidia won!

[u/elanorym]

You need to have had your head not stuck in the sand to see this coming. So I wouldn't call it that obvious.