Hi guy,
I am currently fixing my house and I want to have a small room for home theater so I can watch movie and listen to music peacefully in there. I also have a 4k smart TV in my bedroom and planning to buy a PC as well. To be more specific, I have 2 separate room:
-Bedroom:
a 49" 4K TV
a PC
-Home theater:
A/V Receiver: AVR-X1300W
HD Player: HiMedia q10 pro
Wifi router
NAS
I recently bought a 6 TB WD RED 3.5" HDD. Outside from that, I have not bought anything yet. I want to stream 4k contents to my TV and movie with high-quality audio in my home theater. Also I prefer to use NAS as a Plex server more than using my PC. Now I don’t want to spend more than $200 for Wifi router and $500 for NAS. I hope you guy can help me to find a suitable solution for this one.
Thanks.
I think any recent and decent NAS would do the trick if your network is good. You will however have to make sure you have the player that can play your media directly, without transcoding on your NAS.
I had some time to do a little research and because I am not really a tech-guy so a NAS seems a better choice. I came to decision to buy Synology and the DS218+ seems like a suitable one. However, there are 4 bays like the DS418, DS418Play and DS918+. Now of course, the more bays the better, but the performance is what I worry about since the DS418 is not as strong as DS218+. Moreover, the DS418Play, I believe, to be as powerful as the DS218+ but the price is $300 higher, and an extra $100 more will get me the DS918+ (These are the prices in my country, this is mainly for example since I probably be able to find a more affordable retailer).
Now there are only about 3 people in my house using it and 4k media is not likely to be often used nor important in this case.The question is which one in those 4 is the most efficient on price/performance. Furthermore I can not find all of those devices on Plex NAS compatibility a little bit of confusing whether is my NAS device will be suitable for Plex.
A little bit outside Plex is that I often watch blu-ray movies in .iso files so it is also quite heavy, and I wonder if all of those devices can handle them. And every devices will using Ethernet connections as well.
Over the long haul you will end up disappointed in a NAS as your library grows and you serve up more clients types…
IMO I think you will get much more bang for your buck investing in a i7 laptop with the highest passmark you can afford and store your media on USB connected HDDs.
Careful media preparation is also important. IE: encode to direct play and if you want the media to stream to your non-4K devices, create 1080p media as well for them…
My suggestion is buy at least a 4bay NAS with an Intel CPU.
That will do the job if your media is coded correctly.
Then down the track and you want bigger movies and wish to remotely share a few streams you but a Shield pro ($300) or an i5 or i7 NUC ($600-900) to be your server and the NAS then becomes storage only!
Not sure why when you can get a more than capable laptop for about the same or less which will future proof your setup somewhat??
But heck… That would work too…
Sometimes I think folks think using a NAS is just cool and sounds sooo techie when there are MORE capable and less expensive solutions in the long run…
Remember OS is kinda important as well. Are you comfortable with Linux (Another bytehead choice as well)
I have found the investment in clients (Specifically shield’s) to be worth it long term to ensure I can continue to operate using a NAS as the PMS. Take the time to understand formats and rip to good supported format (as Trumpy notes, MP4 H.264/AAC) and with good wired clients like the shield or PMP you won’t be asking your PMS to transcode anything anyway.
If you MUST do it over wifi the investment in your WiFi infrastructure is also VERY important as noted since 4k native playback requires quite a bit of bandwidth.
If you are in a position with media/network/client control to limit the situations where transcoding is required (through a fast network and use of good clients & ripping) then a NAS may be a great answer. A 918+ can easily have 48TB of storage in it right now if you don’t mind shelling out for the 12TB drives- that’s a large library.
One other upside to the NAS hosting it is that updates to the NAS are managed and easy to install, and installing/updating PMS is super easy thanks to Chuck & the Plex team’s efforts. No need to be a linux administrator to run PMS on a NAS.
@“myloveisgone_9x@yahoo.com” said:
I had some time to do a little research and because I am not really a tech-guy so a NAS seems a better choice. I came to decision to buy Synology and the DS218+ seems like a suitable one. However, there are 4 bays like the DS418, DS418Play and DS918+. Now of course, the more bays the better, but the performance is what I worry about since the DS418 is not as strong as DS218+. Moreover, the DS418Play, I believe, to be as powerful as the DS218+ but the price is $300 higher, and an extra $100 more will get me the DS918+ (These are the prices in my country, this is mainly for example since I probably be able to find a more affordable retailer).
Now there are only about 3 people in my house using it and 4k media is not likely to be often used nor important in this case.The question is which one in those 4 is the most efficient on price/performance. Furthermore I can not find all of those devices on Plex NAS compatibility a little bit of confusing whether is my NAS device will be suitable for Plex.
A little bit outside Plex is that I often watch blu-ray movies in .iso files so it is also quite heavy, and I wonder if all of those devices can handle them. And every devices will using Ethernet connections as well.
Thanks.
Of the NAS you listed, I would recommend spending the extra dollars and go for the Synology DS918+. It is by far the strongest of the lot and with HW Acceleration enabled it is even better.
4K → 1080p is not a problem for the DS918+ and it will handle 2 or 3 1080p transcodes with ease.
Plex does NOT support .iso files or any other disk image format. You need to rip any DVD/BD (.iso etc.) preferably to MP4 H.264/AAC or AVC/AAC as that is the most compatible format across the most devices.
Just remember though, you need to run NAS rated hard drives and they are a little more expensive than a desktop hard drive. It is also wise to use a UPS when running a NAS also.
I would also recommend a Skull Canyon NUC + cheap NAS, any NAS will do, but preferably Synology or QNAP if you want to get your monies worth. You can run Windows 10 and PMS and PMP as well and it will serve for all but the most difficult files to play.
I know that Plex does not play .iso files. For .iso files, I will play offline by a HD Player. Having said that, there are some people I can actually stream .iso file from a NAS (if compatible, of course), but I have not found the right HD Player for that purpose.
I am also a little bit confused by the NUC here. Are you suggesting that a NUC will do the decoding or what? I am planning on buying one with an i5 core, however, since my budget is a little bit tight.
