The Nvidia Shield does indeed serve as a powerful streaming player. It will not only passthrough both DTS-MA and Dolby TrueHD, but it also supports MPEG-2 video, as well as other codecs that are not supported by Roku. But all that does come at a cost. It's almost twice the price of a Roku Ultra, and the Shield Pro is $300. Also, it doesn't have as nice a user interface for playing local media. Kodi (or the Shield specific version called
SPMC) provides the best UI, but it's much more complicated than using the Roku Media Player..Roku is keeping beta testers extremely busy, so I have high hopes the issues are being addressed. Unfortunately, no one can say in this forum exactly what is being worked on.
Dan
Roku Stick (3600), Ultra (4640), Premiere (3920), Insignia 720p Roku TV, Sharp 4K Roku TV, Nvidia Shield, Windows 10 Pro x64 running Serviio and Plex on a wired Gigabit network.