Unofficial NVIDIA Shield Image Adds USB Tuners

Nick Felker
 
Nvidiausb tuner

USB tuners on Android TV allow users to watch over-the-air channels and even record them locally to watch them later. The feature should be included in the firmware for Android TVs running version 7.0 and up, but when the NVIDIA Shield TV received the update last month USB tuner support was notably not available yet. This feature will come in a future update, but individuals who are interested now are able to use a custom system image.

The guide comes from user Linux4all on the GeForce forums. With a downloaded boot image, you can then flash that onto your Shield TV. When you reboot, you then get full access to USB tuners in Live Channels. Based on the screenshots the feature seems to work very well. It has been tested with a handful of Hauppauge USB tuners.

The custom kernel is available on as well, so others can contribute to the codebase or port to another device.

Nick Felker

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop. Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.

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  • nmwhit06

    Now if only Nvidia would get around to including that in an update. Although I will say I’m very impressed with how well the HDHomeRun tuner works with Live Channels after the latest update.

  • Mike

    Does the same “No Audio try another TV” issue still apply via this kernel? It would seem the proper audio processing license would be required for the Shield for those who’s TV cannot process audio.