[Shield Android TV General] orificium:
I have the 2015 16GB version. I figured I'd share my trials and tribulations from the past few days of messing with Zulu's custom ROM for the Shield.

My first obstacle was getting into fastboot using the hardware method. It's actually easier if you just do it from adb. The written instructions on videomap.it are garbage. You should touch and continue pressing the power button before plugging in the power cable. Count to 3. Release for one second and then hold again until fastboot menu comes up. Oddly enough, they do link a video that describes this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzHF-uNiY8

I had more trouble using Windows adb/fastboot/drivers to flash so I used Linux Mint (Ubuntu variant) which I had on my laptop and doesn't require any special USB drivers.

You just need to install the adb and fastboot tools.:

sudo apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot

Then when I used adb and fastboot, adb ran perfectly fine but fastboot required SUDO for whatever reason. Use "sudo fastboot devices" to confirm you're connected.

Then I had a lot of trouble flashing vendor.img because I kept getting FAILED: data too large errors. I was convinced I hosed my shield, but as long as you can get into fastboot, you're fine. Fortunately I found a post in the geforce forums that suggested lowering the sparse file size using the -S command line argument.

For example: fastboot -S 50M flash vendor vendor.img

You can also do this with system.img

Also, it's important to wipe your userdata between switching ROMs.

While in fastboot: sudo fastboot -w

You have to root and modify build.prop to get the power button working properly. And you have to install Tile Root to get a proper full-screen immersive mode shortcut and power options shortcut in your notification tray. Which BTW is annoying as hell to deal with using a mouse/keyboard when you want to swipe. And especially annoying with a gamepad controller: see below.

There's just way too many little issues using stock android on the shield. As far as I know you can't get certain leanback apps on stock android that were important to me, like the nice leanback launcher, and play music. I was able to get the Android TV version of YouTube on it, but that wasn't enough for me. Plus the latest version sucks. I prefer the version that comes on with recovery OS 5.2. A big part of the reason I wanted to put stock Android on my shield was so I could have full access to the Google Play store, but honestly you can side-load most things you might want on the stock rom - a browser, emulators, etc.

Use this to get non-leanback apps on leanback launcher - https://play.google.com/store/apps/...hl=en&rdid=news.androidtv.tvapprepo.playstore

- HALauncher (alternative to leanback) crashes if you go too far right on any horizontal menu. It's annoying.

- Certain apps don't bring up a keyboard you can use if you're not using a wireless keyboard/mouse which I don't always want to deal with.

- When you do use a keyboard/mouse, some input modals will expand to this full screen input window which is rather annoying to me.

- Zulu (videomap.it) really wants to push his DroidMote app for android gaming I'm guessing. Because I tried using it for navigating around Android, but it's clunky and has certain hiccups. For example, when you try to use the shield game controller as a mouse using his custom keyboard input method, moving around the cursor and click is fine for the most part, but certain modals that pop-up disable the cursor. And it doesn't even present a pop-up keyboard that you can use to enter in text when click on an input box. It's essentially worthless IMO.

So... I've since gone back to the stock 5.2 image found here: https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworksdownload

The stock ROM is just superior IMO. Yes, the play store is limited. Yes, the YouTube app sucks. Why is there a huge ****ty overlay when you pause a video and you can't view description or comments is beyond my understanding I guess. That is actually one of the main reasons I wanted to try stock Android. But guess what, although you can see description, still no comments, and it's far more annoying to navigate YouTube using a mouse/keyboard on a "touch" enabled version of the app.

So using an Android ROM designed mainly for touch screens is nowhere near ideal to have on the Shield. Definitely not family friendly either. I got some enjoyment out of tinkering with it for a couple days, but no thank you.

Also, if you use Kodi at all, SPMC 16.7 works so nicely with the stock 5.2 shield ROM.

Anyway, I hope you have some better luck and more patience than I did!