Nvidia Shield TV gets a surprise free upgrade with a bunch of improvements

Nvidia's current Android TV streamers have been around for five years now, yet still remain among the best streaming devices on the market.

That's testament to the hardware inside the Nvidia Shield TV Pro and standard Shield TV, which was arguably overpowered on their 2019 launch, but continues to be on a par with today's peers.

The only issue has been a seeming lack of focus by Nvidia itself, at least in recent times. The set-top-box and dongle have been largely left without any significant updates in around a year. But no longer.

A surprise update has arrived with a number of key improvements – ensuring your existing Shield TV device runs at its best. It includes enhancements and fixes to a number of issues experienced by Shield TV owners over the year, with frame rate matching perhaps being the most visible.

Here's the entire list of changes made with the hotfix 33.2.0.252:

• Match Frame Rate (beta) enhancement
• Resolves issue with SHIELD drive filling up
• Fixes the issue of No audio heard when headset is connected to controller and DAP is on
• Resolves issue of Geforce now crash after launch
• Ability to clear HDMI 1.4 flag via factory reset
• Fixed video distortion on "RGB 8-bit Rec.709" display mode
• Resolved USB HDD/Flash drive showing corrupted after hotplug
• NAS folder info shows 0 B and not the actual capacity
• Mounted storages aren't listed after upgrade
• Fixes occasional crashes in DRM apps

Some Shield TV devices might not have received the upgrade yet, but it's seemingly in the process of rolling out globally. Our own Nvidia Shield TV Pro is still on version 9.1.1 (33.2.0.157), for example.

You can check whether you've received the latest hotfix by heading to Settings > Device Preferences > About > System upgrade > Check for upgrade.

Nvidia's devices currently run Android 11, but there's no word yet on whether they will get a complete upgrade to Android 12 for TV, which was released for other platforms earlier this year. It'd be tricky to simply switch over as there are Nvidia-specific technologies available on Shield TV devices, including system-wide AI upscaling for a number of the video apps.