To NAS or not to NAS that is the question?

Jonnibravo

Jonnibravo

Jonnibravo

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Joined
2 Jan 2014
Posts
194
Hi everyone,

I have a crapy samsung Q8OR TV That does not support 4k Dolby vision video's. The only solution I have found is to put the videos my TV Does not Support on a HDD install Plex on the TV and Stream from my P.C. So that got me thinking about Setting up a NAS Server.

The problem is would a £150-200 NAS play and decode 4k that my tv does not support
 
Have you considered a media player that supports the format instead of using the inbuilt player?

In all honesty you'd likely need to go up to the £250-300 range nas with the intel cpu's in them because most arm based nas don't have the built in h265 transcoding hardware (basically quicksync).
 
I thought about an nvidia shield but it would cost 150 for the shield then I'd need to buy the storage, and the shield can only be used when it is switched on. I like the Idea of having a server I can access anywhere, anytime.

What NAS would you recommend to do the job I'd want a minimum 4tb of storage.
 
Super cheap option would be to run a Raspberry Pi 4 with a kodi like OS (LibreELEC or similar?) and stream the movies from a share on your PC.

Spending a bit more money you could put a USB drive on the Pi and copy the movies there.

There are a number of more expensive single board computers that will run something like LibreELEC and do the same from a share or local storage. Intel NUCs can do this but are more expensive again.

Then the final option would be something running a kodi like OS and having all your media on a NAS somewhere.

A mate runs an nVidia shield and can't say enough good things about it.

I'm running an Odroid N2 with CoreELEC. It's great but an N2 I bought for another project died after 6 months and the UK supplier only provides a 90 day guarantee from new so I had to faff about with my credit card company to get a full refund.

If you're looking at a NAS I'd argue you should stay away from QNAP as they're forever in the news about vulnerabilities. A few friends use Synology and seem happy with them. If you're into that kind of thing you can run one of the NAS unix-like OSs on some spare hardware.

If you want to run something like Plex to 4K from the NAS then you want to make sure it will do hardware decoding of whatever encoding algorithm you're using. I've never used Plex but I think it does transcoding on the fly? Does that need a bit more ooomph?
 
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