Looking for a little advice, but first some background. I’ve always run my PMS on an always on Mac desktop. For years this was an iMac but I recently bought a Mac Studio w/ M1 Max. My media was always stored on a Drobo 5C which was direct attached to the Mac. Then Drobo announced they are not supporting the latest version of MacOS and thus I migrated all my media over to a Synology DS1520. In watching Plex in this setup, I’ve noticed that most my movies (blu-ray rips in MKV container) are being transcoded (where as previously they were direct played) on an AppleTV 4K which is my main media consumption device. This causes noticeable delay when starting a movie and lag when FF or Rewinding.
So my question is this: would I be better off moving the PMS over to run direct on the DS1520? Would that enable direct play again vs transcoding? Would this improve performance to co-locate the media and PMS? I have plenty of headroom on the Mac Studio to transcode, I just would prefer less lag/delay when starting a movie or using transport controls. Or is this a problem with my current combo (Mac Studio and DS1520) not playing nice with AppleTV? Should I look to get a Shield instead? I guess I’m not 100% sure if the transcoding is caused by the media being on a NAS now (as opposed to DAS) or if I’d be better off moving the PMS or replacing the player? Or just shut up and live with it lol
