I currently have a QNAP TS-1263RP with 16GB of ram, (2) M.2 SSD 1GB for cache memory loaded with Plex media app. I also have a plex pass and the NAS has over 10TB of free space. I currently run for my main TV a Nvidia Shield Pro as the client in my home theater system. I can play a movie and it is flawless. Then I can play the exact same move again and I get video pausing but the audio is fine. Then later I can get a perfect movie with the same file. This happens with any movie 1080p or 480p doesn’t matter. I currently have 1G switches and Cat5e or better between any device (the longest run has 10G service, 70ft). I have never seen my network with more than 50% of max traffic at any point (this is from max data passed in a test, not hypothetical).
Having a Nvidia Shield Pro I thought it would play any media so long as it is in the correct format (I think 95% of my stuff is mp4 files). This has lead my to my question, I am missing something of how this works to transcode. I read about hardware encoding and have it turned on even though the quality could suffer. I did not see anything in the help files about software transcoding. If I watch the plex dashboard for my NAS, I normally see the total CPU usage around 8-12% and the bandwidth around 25Mbps. On occasion when I start or resume a movie I might see 50% memory usage and 330Mbps on the bandwidth. The plex dashboard shows CPU usage for plex around 1.5% all the time.
I totally understand the NAS I have is not the best for Plex so looking at upgrading to a QNAP TVS-873e or TS-873A and add a graphics card to it. My other option is building a high end PC with with an internal raid card to build a NAS with it. I hope to add 4k movies later but at this moment not a priority, I will only have more problems until I fix this. I would prefer any upgrade not have to have a box directly in my living room where my home theater is at. I have no clue if a video card from a NAS would need to be plugged into my home theater receiver Via HDMI for the best results or not. I am open to other QNAP solutions that I can buy new today (think they had a TVS-883-BBR that was really good but not longer for sale, might not help me anyway).
As a note I have a few Roku’s and 4k firesticks scattered around the house but not as concerned with these to play movies. I have these in places like the garage to play YouTube videos normally to reference something I might be working on.
Since I am having issues but can’t pinpoint the problem, here I am 
