I am setting up a new home theater. Plex on The NVidia Shield Pro is the media source, which outputs to an HDMI splitter (HD Fury Arcana) into separate Audio and Video HDMIs. The Audio HDMI goes to a Sonos Arc soundbar, and the Video HDMI goes to my projector.
As for content, I don’t play games, I don’t watch YouTube, I don’t use Netflix, I don’t listen to podcasts. All I do is download movies and TV shows via reliable torrent sources and put them on a huge hard drive. So the only thing I will use the Nvidia Shield for is running Plex, and the only thing I will use Plex for is selecting and playing these movies/TV Shows.
To store my media, one option is to point the Plex Media Server instance on my Shield to a NAS. That is, a 12tb external USB3 hard drive that is attached to my openWRT router. This router will be connected to the Nvidia Shield via a physical CAT6 ethernet connection. Another option is to plug a dedicated external USB hard drive directly to the Shield, and use this to hold my media.
I slightly prefer the latter solution, because a dedicated USB3 HDD seems less exposed to silly networking issues while watching media. However, I am not sure how I will get the media onto this hard drive for Plex Server to index (and for Plex Client to consume).
What mechanisms do I have to transfer files – very large files (20-60 gigs usually) from my torrent machine to the HDD attached to my Nvidia Shield? Would Plex Server expose this drive as a writable network share, to which I can copy files in my native Mac file manager? Are there any gotchas for transferring such large files?
The Shield can function as a SMB server. I believe you can mount the Shield attached drive from your PC, then copy the files to the Shield like you would any other server.
I’ve a 2015 Shield Pro with an internal 500GB drive. I can mount the drive from my PC to transfer files to/from the Shield. I’ve never tried it with an external drive attached to the Shield.
This is enabled in the Shield storage options, not Plex client/server options.
Gee, I don’t think I have the patience to try and get PMS running on my OpenWRT router, but that is an very interesting idea I will keep in the back of my mind!
I like the idea of using PMS on the NVidia Shield, and having it pull media from the NAS on my router. I’m just nervous that pulling the files over a network will cause stuttering video playback, inexplicably reduced audio quality, that kind of thing. Because it seems like it always happens whenever a network is involved. Hopefully having a hardwired CAT6 ethernet connection between the NAS and the NVidia Shield prevents this. But I would not be surprised in the least if there were some hokey network issues that turns it into a nightmare… in which case my fallback plan is to get a dedicated USB3 HDD and attach it directly to the NVidia Shield.
Ah, if I can expose the external USB3 drive on my NVidia Shield as an SMB volume on my network, then I think I’m all set with my fallback plan. Of course, the question remains as to whether or not file transfers to it will mysteriously drop out 75% of the way through, and other kooky network stuff like that, but on paper it sounds good!
Thanks Plex community for entertaining what is arguably a NVidia Shield inquiry: I had a hard time trying to figure out whether to post it here or an NVidia forum. You guys seem to have your act together a lot more than the kids on the NVidia place!
Once I get this set up, I will follow up and let you know how it works, in case anyone else should come along with the same idea.
To clarify: I have a Netgear WRT3200ACM that is running OpenWRT operating system, with a 12TB USB3 HDD attached to it as a mount point. I always figured this was “Network Attached Storage”, but regardless of my semantics, this is what I got.
sure, it loosely falls into the technical definition of ‘network attach storage’, in so much as does a normal windows computer with a shared folder.
a normal “NAS” is a purpose built network storage device, with internal, expandable, storage, typically involving RAID for redundancy and expandability.
since you seem worried about “because a dedicated USB3 HDD seems less exposed to silly networking issues while watching media”, unless you have severe network problems, you would more likely encounter cpu/ram issues on your router causing slow downs/buffering, than the network causing it.
But anyway, really the only one who can decide is you, if you are unsure, simply try it both ways.
Agreed! I’ll try it out with PMS on the NVidia Sield, pulling content from the USB HDD on my router first. If that gives me grief I’ll try with a USB HDD connected directly to the NVidia Shield.
My plan is to have a dedicated bit torrent machine, which downloads torrents directly to a big external USB hard drive I’ve attached to my NVidia Shield TV Pro, and which the Plex Media Server on the Shield scans for media. It is working well so far.
I plugged a 10TB external USB drive to the Nvidia Shield TV Pro, and to expose this external hard drive on my network, I enabled “Transfer files over local network” on my Nvidia Shield, which produced a local network IP address (of the shield device), and generated a random login and password. I was then able to use “Connect to Server” in Mac Finder to connect, over the SMB protocol, to the address the Shield gave me (i.e., smb://192.168.xx.xxx). Finder prompted me to authenticate, which I did using the credentials the Shield produced earlier.
For the past week, it has been reliable. I have a headless, always-on Mac Mini on a VPN, which I use as my bit torrent machine (I use the app Transmission). I have shared a folder from this Mac Mini, “Torrents to Download”, and set Transmission up to use groups, with the “TV” group file location as /Volumes/ShieldExternalUSBDrive/TV, and the “Movies” group to /Movies.
So as I think of new media I’d like to download, I drop the torrent file into the “Torrents to Download” network share on my dedicated Torrent machine. Transmission will then automatically begin downloading the torrent directly onto the USB hard drive attached to my Shield, and Plex will eventually index the movie / TV show.
Another update: It is still working fine, but one thing I’ve noticed is that transferring large media files from my torrent box, over my wifi network, and to the USB3 HDD plugged into the Shield happens at around 20 megabits per second, which is 4-6 hours to transfer a 40-50GB piece of content over – a bit tedious.
Go wired Gigabit Ethernet for both the Shield and the torrent box. Wired gigabit will be much faster than using WiFi.
If wired Ethernet is not possible, make sure you are on 5 GHz WiFi (if you’ve a strong 5GHz signal at the device locations). In the Shield network settings you can force it to 5 GHz only (useful if your 5 & 2.4 networks have the same SSID).
Thank you for your suggestions – I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. As it turns out, the devices in question both happen to be on a 5 GHz connection and it’s still quite slow, but it makes sense to force 5GHz since, as you speculate, I have both 2.4 and 5 GHz on the same SSID.
If desired, you can use iperf3 to measure the network (not SMB file sharing) throughput between the two devices.
Run the appropriate iperf3 binary on the torrent box. It runs from the command line. For Win10, something like c:\foo\iperf3 -s.
Use the Analiti app on the Shield. It is available in the Google Play Store. Go to the iperf3 client section of the app and enter the IP address of the server.
I run an iperf3 server on my Synology DS918+, which has a wired gigabit connection.
When my Shield is on WiFi, I see ~250 Mbps up/down. When on wired Ethernet, it is about twice that. My Macbook, plugged into the same switch as the WiFi access point, hits close to 1 Gbps up/down.
I’ve the 2015 Shield Pro, with an internal hard drive. Transferring a file from my desktop PC (wired) to the Shield (wired) runs at ~40 MB/sec, or ~320 Mbps, according to Windows (the speed in the file transfer window). SMB has some overhead, and the hard drive provided by Nvidia is supposedly terribly slow, so things seem about right.
Not sure what you’ll see with a USB3 drive on a new Shield. And if you cannot change from WiFi to wired, there isn’t much you can do about it. But it will give you an idea about the limitations of the network and equipment.
I got iperf3 running on the Shield, and between various other machines on my network, and my wifi rates are closer to 45 Mbps. This is with a brand new Google Nest Wifi setup, sounds like I need to do a little debugging and see why it’s so slow.
