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Is Android TV still a no?


dmaker

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I know this has been asked before, but I was curious if your position has changed at all given that Android TV seems to be spiking a bit in popularity. I recently bought an Nvidia Shield TV and I love it, but I would love it so much more if I could use Bigbox rather than my current launcher, Arcbrowser. I have a license for Bigbox on my Windows laptop and I think it's the best thing since sliced bread, and I would happily pay more for an Android license. There just is nothing that compares to Bigbox and I miss having it on my HTPC.  I switched to a Shield TV because going from Kodi to Bigbox, or Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc on Windows is a hassle. The Bigbox plugin worked better than the rest, but Windows/Kodi for HTPC is kind of a single purpose solution, imo. Doing much beyond just Kodi becomes a hassle. With the Shield TV I can do all of the above and with a built in game controller. If I could get Bigbox as well, I'd have the perfect setup!

 

Edited by dmaker
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Launchbox on Android was never a"no", it's just a longer term goal. It would require building LB for it from scratch and would take time, this would be time not spent improving the Windows version. The other option would be to pay someone to do it but that would require the money needed to pay someone fulltime which would not be cheap.

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You can stream bigbox to your Shield TV using Nvidia Gamestream. My only problem with this is that it introduces quite a bit of latency. Having tried a bunch of front ends on android though, I do agree nothing there holds a candle to launchbox/bigbox. 

Edit: I actually gave up on front ends and just the Retroarch UI for the most part now, at least for 32 bit systems or less. Standalone emulators seem to stagger the CPU much less than RA cores for things like PPSSPP and Nintendo DS.  

Edited by fromlostdays
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I do have a Geforce GTX 908M in my laptop, so I could stream to my Shield, but that doesn't really interest me for some reason. I like being able to do everything I want to do using the game controller and (for the most part) not even needing to leave Kodi. I can add Android apps to the favorite bar in Kodi and just launch Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime, Arcbrowser, etc from Kodi and then when I exit those other apps, I return back to Kodi. Very wife friendly. 

 

Agreed, re front ends on Android. Not much to write home about. I tried about 4 of them, but settled on Arcbrowser. It's no Bigbox, but it's functional. 

 

I'd contribute to a Gofundme or something to get this started. Maybe Nvidia would be interested in collaborating? 

 

 

Edited by dmaker
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Brand new user/member/etc here.  Just bought a lifetime.   One of the first searches I did before beginning what is undoubtedly going to be a long and painful endeavor migrating folders/paths/media/directories etc to set up Launchbox was to see what my options were for my shieldTV units.

The number one motivator for me is actually BigBox as I rarely game at my pc anymore.   I'm getting old, sitting up is for younguns :P

At current I have two shieldTV's which replaced two steamlinks purely due to the  steamlinks inability to stream at 4k.   So far so good.  Retroarch has been my go-to through the sheildTV's steam link app.   Unfortunately issues began to crop up and who's at fault, I dont know.  Im troubleshooted out.  Days of roll backs, roll forwards, compiling/testing yada yada.   Anything that seems to use a hardware renderer (i think thats what ties them together) or requires a bit more upfront load time, seems to stream to a black screen with audio if loaded from the gui's playlist while streaming.   (dolphin core, ppsspp core, citra core, even psx hw core).   

Minor as I can circumvent it by launching games directly via command line shortcuts which I assume is what launchbox is going to do anyways, so win win!

add in the fact its much more thorough from a metadata perspective (UI is and likely always will be RA's weakspot, understandable considering) and I'm excited to get rolling.

only thing that concerns me is emulators outside of RA and controls.  Currently I launch associated games via command line shortcuts in steam BPM.  This allows me to create a controller map I can apply to each game or system and save it.

Launching via launchbox is going to remove that as an option which is going to complicate things substantially.   Things like cemu which I use with my steam controller (due to how darn powerful the mapping is) allows me to use buttons to toggle the gamepad display etc.    Either way, will cross that bridge when I get there.

A native android app, coupled with the new shieldtv thats supposedly on the horizon ought to circumvent a lot of problems and be amazing.  Steam link app is a pretty complete solution that excels in some areas, but definitely has its drawbacks. 

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