Confused what to do with all my movies on my hard drives

Helen Barber

Helen Barber

Helen Barber

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492
Would really appreciate any help!

I have 4 hard drives downstairs with all my movies on and they are attached to my nvidia shield TV pro. I have standard bluray as well 4k UHD HDR blurays I have backed up from my collection.

Upstairs I have exactly the same setup (4x drives) with our projector and I treat this as a backup of downstairs, so the odd day I take my laptop upstairs to backup new movies etc.

I'm getting sick of having to keep upstairs the same as downstairs regards backups.

From searching I could buy some type of Raid hardware, attach all 8 drives, which would be perfect!.... But I dont feel confident that 4k bluray HDR movies will freely play smoothly via network, especially if the kids are gaming etc.

The great thing about nvidia shield TV is HDMI output, no loss in playback but doesnt offer any backup.

Can you think of any options please?

I would just love one database with all my movies on that I could freely connect my shields to.


Thanks Greg & Helen
 
Helen Barber said:
How does plex manage 4k UHD HDR files ?

:)
Click to expand...

Perfectly fine.

I've been using it for years. I run a Plex server on my PC and my Nvidia Shield plays all my 4k and standard Blu-ray rips directly, so the pc doesn't have to do any transcoding. The only thing you'll sacrifice versus playing directly from the Blu-ray disk is Dolby Vision.

Internet usage won't affect playback over a home network.

The only thing that affects playback of 4k Blu-ray rips is either writing to the same HDD at the same time as reading from it. Or trying to read more than one 4k Blu-ray rip at a time same time. That's a limitation of disk read and write speeds than network or software.

And no, you won't need a Plex Pass.
 
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barmyllama said:
Internet usage won't affect playback over a home network.
Click to expand...

I thought he had implied bandwidth concerns with wireless comms from downstairs to upstairs, in combination with childrens use,
if all the drives were amalgamted downstairs - so the bitrate of 'rips' could be important,
or you'd need wired network on any upstairs tv, or the roku/shield type, sticks attached to them.
 
Also Raid != backup...

You could put together some sort of NAS to "host" your media which saves the need of constantly plugging in drives to whatever device you're watching from. And then perform a backup/sync of those drives to another system hosting your backup drives.

Although it goes without saying, it's not a very strong backup solution. It might protect you from data loss in the event of any data corruption. But wouldn't protect you from something like fire/flood.
 
jpaul said:
I thought he had implied bandwidth concerns with wireless comms from downstairs to upstairs, in combination with childrens use,
if all the drives were amalgamted downstairs - so the bitrate of 'rips' could be important,
or you'd need wired network on any upstairs tv, or the roku/shield type, sticks attached to them.
Click to expand...

Looking into adding ethernet support, it seems like Plex is the way forward :)

Hopefully I can set my pc to wakeup once plex loads from both Nvidia shields and goes into sleep mode when not in use. My PC has a lot of power hungry devices and wouldn't want it staying on, for obvious reasons :)
 
jpaul said:
I thought he had implied bandwidth concerns with wireless comms from downstairs to upstairs, in combination with childrens use,
if all the drives were amalgamted downstairs - so the bitrate of 'rips' could be important,
or you'd need wired network on any upstairs tv, or the roku/shield type, sticks attached to them.
Click to expand...

Wireless N on 2.4Ghz is rated at 300Mbps and on 5Ghz it's 900Mbps. I don't think there are any 4k UHD Blu-ray movies that exceed 100Mbps so it shouldn't be an issue unless the router is the limiting factor.
 
Helen Barber said:
Looking into adding ethernet support, it seems like Plex is the way forward :)

Hopefully I can set my pc to wakeup once plex loads from both Nvidia shields and goes into sleep mode when not in use. My PC has a lot of power hungry devices and wouldn't want it staying on, for obvious reasons :)
Click to expand...

You can use one of your Nvidia Shields to run your Plex server.
 
The Shield does not work properly with Atmos encoded MKV’s over Ethernet via Plex. You have to use it with WiFi otherwise the sound will cut out every so often for a second.
 
pioneer2000 said:
The Shield does not work properly with Atmos encoded MKV’s over Ethernet via Plex. You have to use it with WiFi otherwise the sound will cut out every so often for a second.
Click to expand...

I don't have any issues with audio dropouts with Plex in any format, including Atmos and DTS X, on either of my Shields (2017 & 2019 pro versions) and they are both connected via Ethernet.

My main Shield is connected directly to my AVR, so maybe your issue is related to ARC? Because I was getting audio dropouts from my Sky Q box with Dolby Digital soundtracks when using ARC. But I connected the box directly to the AVR and it's solved the problem.
 
barmyllama said:
I don't have any issues with audio dropouts with Plex in any format, including Atmos and DTS X, on either of my Shields (2017 & 2019 pro versions) and they are both connected via Ethernet.

My main Shield is connected directly to my AVR, so maybe your issue is related to ARC? Because I was getting audio dropouts from my Sky Q box with Dolby Digital soundtracks when using ARC. But I connected the box directly to the AVR and it's solved the problem.
Click to expand...

I have a thread saved where the exact detail of this issue is presented, it’s apparently a fault with the Ethernet controller firmware. I guess it could have been potentially fixed in the last year or so but needless to say there are many reported cases of this issue occurring.

For clarity, this is with the Shield connected via a Denon AV receiver. Over Wi-Fi it is fine, connected with Ethernet the audio will drop out randomly for a second and then come back.
 
pioneer2000 said:
I have a thread saved where the exact detail of this issue is presented, it’s apparently a fault with the Ethernet controller firmware. I guess it could have been potentially fixed in the last year or so but needless to say there are many reported cases of this issue occurring.

For clarity, this is with the Shield connected via a Denon AV receiver. Over Wi-Fi it is fine, connected with Ethernet the audio will drop out randomly for a second and then come back.
Click to expand...

My AVR is also a Denon.

That's not to say I haven't had audio drop outs from Plex in the past. But that wasn't limited to Atmos.
 
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