Best Home Player Setup

Plex Players
1

I need some real advice on a new system setup.

I am moving soon and have the ability to build out a new setup. My current setup is a dated i7 NUC with a Razer external GPU enclosure with an Nvidia 1080. 2 Drobo 5N’s both used to 50% capacity. One is 5x 8TB the other is 5x12TB. I host about 5 active friends with accounts and play ag home mostly from apple TV, and all over WIFI.

Here are my issues and questions.
Currently i cannot play larger 4k files, with plex stating my server is not powerful enough. My friends can play about 50% of my catalog. (I. Care less about them, but if my solution helps them that would be cool.) Some file infuse will work for me, but mostly not. I want to be able to play anything i throw at it in 4k 120mhz if possible.

What is the optimal setup for a home player?

  1. A new beefed up PC with a high passmark CPU internal RX7900, linux os, playing directly on the no longer supported plex media player (or XBMC/Media Portal) with a flirc dongle and sofa baton x1s? This would run off an 8-Bay qnap NAS with a 10GB DAC connection. Overkill?

  2. Do I tone down the server and get an Nvidia shield as my player?

  3. Is there a version I still use Apple TV? Or Pi?

Im leaning toward beefy system into an 8x8 4k HDMI matrix switch so i can use the beefy setup in all rooms.

Im pretty confident in my abilities, windows/linux/All hardware/Networking , so let me know your thoughts.

2

Are you planning on removing or keeping the 1080 in the new build? Most people will benefit from having hardware accelerated transcoding as an option and that means an Nvidia GPU or an Intel GPU/iGPU.

3

I was thinking I’d ditch the external RAZER GPU enclosure and upgrade from the 1080 to an RTX4090 on a new tower build. (I wrote RX7900 on accident above) With an Intel Core i9-14900KS.

4

The built-in Intel GPU hardware acceleration is really good. It is possible that also having a $1500+ GPU for transcoding is overkill.

5

So upgrade my system, and keep the 1080. Will the AppleTV 4k’s hardwired be good, or should I look into something like an Nvidia shield?

6

It’s likely that the iGPU in the Intel CPU you have picked will do a much better job as a transcoder than the 1080. For one thing the Nvidia GPU has a stream limit (unless you use hacked drivers) and the iGPU does not.

If you want to save more dough you can probably get an i7 or even i5 to serve 5 simultaneous clients especially if any of them are doing Direct Play/Stream which is low effort for the server.

I don’t know anything about Apple TV except that there is a thread on this forum where people are giving feedback on a beta client build that is intended to address some serious performance problems. Not everyone has these problems.

The Shield TV is a good device in general and perhaps the safest bet… But which client device to pick depend on the display and what kind of content you watch and your passthrough needs. None of them are perfect.

I abandoned using a PC as the client a long time ago. A streaming box or smart TV app was so much less work.

Im leaning toward beefy system into an 8x8 4k HDMI matrix switch so i can use the beefy setup in all rooms.

That would certainly eliminate some problems but it means that you can’t watch different things in all the locations, right? And that seems like it would be a shame to give up.