Hello All. Right now I am running Plex server on my iMac, and simply streaming content over my home’s wireless network. As you might guess, large files take a while to load on my playback devices, and often have to buffer. I don’t want to play a transcoded, compressed version of my files. I want the highest quality possible. Theoretically, I want it to look as good as if I’m playing the blu-ray disc. What’s the best network setup to use here? Will passing connecting everything up to a wired router improve quality? On the playback side, I am using an Amazon Fire TV in one location, and an Xbox One in another.
Thanks
In a home network, your wireless connection is probably not causing the transcoding issue. Your client and the display/audio device connected to it are what will determine if transcoding is required. If your rip has 7.1 TrueHD audio, and your Fire TV doesn’t support it, the audio will be transcoded. The same thing goes for the container, resolution, etc.
My advise for optimum quality:
Wire up both server and clients.
Use clients which are able to handle unchanged BluRay remuxes.
If you also want support for all the modern surround sound formats - “bitstreaming” into your AV receiver then it almost automatically means to use either PMP or OpenPHT on carefully configured HTPC hardware.
There are other hardware players which may come close to a fully fledged HTPC, but almost all have some restriction.
Either with video codec support (VC-1) or
the inability to render BluRay subtitles (PGS) without help from the Plex server transcoder or
restricted ‘passthrough’ support because the HDMI interface doesn’t conform to the 2.x revision
Among those devices which may come ‘close’, are
the nVidia Shield (AndroidTV),
the ODroid C2 (only OpenPHT) and
the Wetek Hub (OpenPHT).
