T (they/she)

First of all, thank you for the reply. I always wondered if we could use our Steam Deck for pretty much everything since we have a dock plugged on our TV, but since we have been using the Nvidia Shield Pro as our media player for more than 5 years, I didn’t get out of my way to inform myself.

The Shield Pro was amazing at the start, until the stock launcher started showing ads (we currently avoid them by using an app for Android TVs called Productivity Launcher).

You must ensure you’re using a client that can use the codec in question

Yeah, this is the reason we had to stop using Jellyfin client and switched to Kodi. I think the jellyfin didn’t have support for pass through for the codec our movie was using and Kodi worked fine.

Is there a specific codec you’re concerned about losing access to?

Mainly Douby Atmos/Vision and such. We currently have our 4k TV connected with eARC to our Soundbar and the soundbar connected to the Shield. The only other thing we connected to the soundbar was our Nintendo Switch dock since I couldn’t make surround work otherwise. PS5 surround works fine connected to the TV and I think SD does too (I will need to test it later because I am unsure and I can’t remember).

Thinking about it now I think I do need to at least setup a way to play our stuff from Jellyfin on our SDs using Tailscale, this way we can access our stuff while traveling. At this moment we only access it away from home from our phones to listen to music.

Will you have access to all codecs as well though? This is the main reason we still keep our Nvidia Shield around from years ago