IMO, your nas is going to be overall better to remain the plex server.
the shield as a client will let you direct play 4k content (assuming you also have required avr for HD audio).
direct play should not really affect any other users unless your drives are extremely slow or starting to fail.
- the shield as client should direct play, so that will avoid any transcoding load. the shield as a server, will simply be using the nas as media storage, so it will remove the plex load load from your nas, and put it on the shield.
whether this will be an improvement, is hard to say. The shield is similar in power to a smart phone but with a really good gpu. The gpu is only used for transcoding though, so the overal plex performance will be limited to the arm cpu processor.
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this again depends on whether transcoding, if 2-3 people are direct streaming from the shield, it should be about the same load as if they were direct streaming directly from the nas. The shield itself, according to plex, can handle 2-3 transcodes.
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not easily. the paths to the media will be different. also, shield does not give you direct access to its storage, you would need to configure the shield to use an external drive to store plex data.
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IMO no. other than transcoding, the shield is a lower power device that the nas server you already have.
please read @
finally, using the shield as a client only, ought to relieve your nas from the transcoding duties, thus allowing it to continue to serve as however it has normally done for you.
as far as other users, remote or local, if they cannot direct play 4k, then the simplest and cheapest solution is do not let them access any 4k content.
please read entire thread @ Plex, 4k, transcoding, and you for a lot of 4k related discussion.
