As someone who relies on the Nvidia Shield for my home theater setup, I’ve been looking for an alternative that can handle my full-quality 4K Blu-ray MKVs, including Dolby Vision Profile 7 and lossless audio formats. The Shield has been my go-to because of its ability to pass through everything just the way I want it, but it’s a ten-year-old device and starting to feel like it may not be long for this world.
So I’ve been searching for something that could step in if the Shield ever disappears—and I may have found one called the Ugoos AM6b Plus – if you’re willing to put in some work. In my latest video, we take a look at this device and how to set it up. After watching you might decide just to pick up a Shield TV instead (compensated affiliate link).
You can currently find it on Amazon (affiliate link), along with other ecommerce sites like Aliexpress. Just be careful as it’s currently subject to a 145% tariff if imported directly from China.
Out of the box, the Ugoos runs Android, but that experience isn’t great. What makes it interesting is its flexibility. You can boot a different operating system off a USB drive. In this case, I used CoreELEC, a bootable version of Kodi, which turns the device into a straightforward media player—no Android apps, just raw playback.
Once set up, it played everything I threw at it: 4K MKVs with Dolby Vision (Profiles 5 and 7), HDR10, and all the major lossless audio formats like DTS:X, Dolby TrueHD, and Atmos. The catch is that getting to that point takes a lot of work. It’s far from plug-and-play.
The hardware itself is solid. It has a metal case, Wi-Fi 6, gigabit Ethernet, multiple USB ports, and analog audio jacks. Internally it runs on an AMLogic S922XJ processor with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage. But you’ll want to boot CoreELEC from a USB stick, which keeps the internal storage intact and allows dual-booting back to Android if needed.
The setup process starts by flashing CoreELEC onto a USB, then manually copying and renaming device-specific files. All of this is detailed in my video and through this helpful guide. Once booted into CoreELEC, I installed the Plex Kodi Connect plugin to integrate with my Plex server.
After all that, the result was accessing my Plex media inside of CoreELEC Kodi. It synced with my server, retained watch progress, supported subtitles, and passed through audio properly over HDMI. The experience isn’t as slick as the native Plex app on the Shield, and services like Netflix are a no-go due to DRM limitations, but for local media playback, it works.
I still recommend grabbing an Nvidia Shield if you don’t have one. It’s simpler and more polished. But if that option goes away, the Ugoos AM6B Plus with CoreELEC is a capable, if labor-intensive, alternative.