So yeah, it sucks… house burned down. OK, not down to the ground… but I’m out a long while regardless.
What I had was a Linux server with Plex PMS and my TV’s were all Samsung smart TV’s that I had the Plex App on. My house is going to take well over a year to fix, so in the meantime they put me up in a rental. It is furnished and has a bajillion TV’s but none of them are “smart”.
I could do the research, but as you can imagine I have a ton of more important things to do. Meanwhile, I’m hoping you smart people can tell me the best things to buy to get me going. I’m going to spec out a new server… but what do I do for the client side? Chromecasts? Roku? What’s the best client for dumb TV’s? I like Chromecast for cost and size. I’m not familiar with the current offerings of all the different devices.
What I don’t want is a big noticeable power-hungry box sitting by each TV.
Oh, wifi only. I won’t have the ability to hardwire the clients.
My favorite options are Roku Ultra, AppleTV 4K, or nVidia Shield. I actually own all three. Compared to each other, they are all plenty fast and smooth to use. I don’t really think one is that much better than the other and have very individual strengths.
Roku Ultra - If I had a gun to my head and had to choose one of three I’d probably get the Roku. It’s fast and has all the channels you could possibly want. The only reason I stopped using it is if you have a video file with a DTS track and you’re trying to actually play it as a DTS track (not transcoded) then you will run into some pretty big audio/picture sync issues.
nVidia Shield - Technically the most capable of the three. Basically runs Android TV OS (if you’ve owned a Sony TV, the UI is identical). Great system and currently what I use. As a plus it doubles as a game system and has a bunch of streaming options for gaming. Issue I’m running into now (as well as many) is that playback from Plex will randomly stop in the middle of videos. Big issue but the Plex team says it’s a nVidia issue. We’ll see if they can resolve it soon.
AppleTV - Also fast and smooth. Feels the smoothest of the three in terms of UI. Great and pretty much only option if you’ve bought into the Apple ecosystem and own a ton of titles from the iTunes store. If not, you may want to consider it. They’ve somehow managed to get the cost of 4k movies down to $15-$20 which is a huge break compared to others. Also free upgrades to 4k if you already own titles that are not and do have a 4k version available. Besides that, it has a sick screensaver. Sounds silly, I know. But it’s mesmerizing. Only reason I’m not using the AppleTV is because it doesn’t natively support DTS. At all. Though just this evening the Plex team may have brought to my attention a solution for that. I’ll have to try it and see.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions about any of those three. Good luck with the house rebuild.
Just what DarkSalyan said. In addition, I use the Roku stick and Amazon Fire stick. They perform excellent and I have one or the other of them on every tv in the house except the main room. As a bonus, the sticks are powered via the tv usb port so, no power adapters. That has a Roku 3. All of these have performed admirably. I do prefer the Amazon interface to the Roku as it allows for the collections and the Roku does not (yet). Performance wise, I can only tell you the Roku 3 can handle full surround because it’s the only one wired to a surround system. All the others are just running through the tv speakers.
