Hi there,
can anyone recommend a TV that will run PLEX from my Synology NAS?
There seem to be 100’s of TV’s to chose from, and it seems to be a bit of a minefield in terms of compatibility.
Picture quality isn’t high up on my priority, so I’ve been looking at 40-43 inch sets around the £300 mark such as
LG 43LF590V
Samsung UE40J5100
Hisense 43 Inch M3000 4K UHD
Many thanks
I rate the Samsung TV Plex app (and Samsung smart TVs in general), however I run it from a dedicated server not a NAS so that may not be much help to you.
I use a Samsung UE40H6400, which is currently available refurbished on ebay in your price range. It’s an older model but still pretty good picture for the price.
In my experience a seamless plex experience is hard from a NAS because they (mostly) don’t have the horsepower to transcode anything so some combination of audio and video format will fall over at some point. If I only had a NAS to run the server on, I’d look at a Roku as the most capable client going (eg, least likely to need anything transcoding) and not bother with the TV apps.
@sugarmonster said:
I rate the Samsung TV Plex app (and Samsung smart TVs in general), however I run it from a dedicated server not a NAS so that may not be much help to you.I use a Samsung UE40H6400, which is currently available refurbished on ebay in your price range. It’s an older model but still pretty good picture for the price.
In my experience a seamless plex experience is hard from a NAS because they (mostly) don’t have the horsepower to transcode anything so some combination of audio and video format will fall over at some point. If I only had a NAS to run the server on, I’d look at a Roku as the most capable client going (eg, least likely to need anything transcoding) and not bother with the TV apps.
I agree that it is quite hard to find a good Plex experience from a NAS but, even though I LOVE my Rokus, I disagree that Roku is a good choice for playing Plex content from a NAS unless you are willing to go to the trouble to get all your content in a Roku compatible format. There are just too many, mostly older, formats that Rokus cannot play without transcoding. The most obvious of those is avi but there are a number of others and many codecs that can be contained within MKV containers also need transcoding to to be played through Rokus.
The clients that seem to be the most completely compatible are any Windows mini computer (NUC?), the Nvidia Shield, or many say the Raspberry PI running PMP or RasPlex. I think the PI lacks some codecs but it is better that the Roku I believe.
I would never recommend a “smart” TV except that TV manufacturers seem to often sell them cheaper that non-smart ones. But I do recommend that you never choose a TV based on its “smart” features as they change too often and TV manufacturers are usually pretty bad at keeping their devices updated.
My recommendation is to get a good TV with lots of inputs and get a separate box to run Plex on. For that box, right now, if price did not matter a lot I think I would choose a Shield with the optional remote. But if I were running Plex on an inadequate machine, like most NAS systems, I would first look to upgrade to a machine able to transcode everything and then get a Roku for a client as it is the easiest to use and setup of all the clients I have tried.
BTW: The storage can remain on a NAS while Plex runs on a separate system on your network. I ran that way for quite a while and many people run that way with huge libraries.
I had it in my head that the newer Roku boxes were widely format compatible, I stand corrected!
A NUC works well, but isn’t cheap. PMP on a Pi also works well, I’ve not checked to see what’s transcoded on it vs direct streamed though.
Raspberry Pi running Rasplex is a very capable little machine, just remember to purchase the codecs from RaspberryPi to increase compatibility.
