How do you watch movies? Direct HDMI link to TV or Samsung link wireless to Plex?

[penyekz]

How do you guys watch TV with your Asustor NAS? Our NAS is special in that it has a HDMI and optical output.

Do you use this method?

I have a samsung smart TV. Another possibility is to link the TV to NAS via wifi and stream the movie. This way is cleaner.

Which method is best for media server and consumption?

[Frode]

About a year or so ago I tried to use the NAS as a direct player (Boxee), but gave up on it. First there were numerous versions where it wasn't able to produce a proper image at all due to some HDMI negotiation issue or some such (green tint all over the place, if I remember correctly). When that finally cleared up after some months, an auto contrast or black point setting was perma-enabled leading to horrible flickering in some scenes and very dim lighting in others.

Then I discovered Plex. I initially ran the server for that on the NAS, but discovered my 604T wasn't powerful enough to transcode to my Chromecast, locking me to view on the computer (re-encoding to suit the Chromecast was out of the question). My final solution was to buy a Mac Mini and run both Plex server and player on that, reducing the NAS to just serving up the files. Very happy with this setup. After months of off and on fiddling with the NAS to try to get things working properly, I was up and running with Plex in an hour. I much preferred its user interface over that of Boxee as well.

[Auberon2k]

I use UPNPv2 and/or MiniDLNA on my 608T to server up media. Initially I was streaming from my playstation 3's about the house but just got a new Samsung smart TV and have started using it to stream from the NAS. I tried Plex once, but my massive TV library isn't all named as it expected (TVDB naming format) so I need to spend a fair chunk of time renaming some shows to properly show up in Plex. DLNA streaming seems to work quite well over my wired network and allows me to keep the NAS in a separate part of my house, closer to my ESX chassis that is quite noisy and uses a chunk of the NAS for a datastore.

[Elrique64]

TVRename or FileBot can do the renaming for you fairly easily. They get their information straight from TVDB so the series names are consistent and Plex seldom has issues with naming conventions when I use it.

In my experience, prior to using Plex, uPnP and DLNA was buggy, to the point of unusable. I currently have 1300+ movies and 165+ TV series with over 12K episodes on my Plex Media Server. All of them named via TVRename or FileBot. All of them in MP4 file format, using H264 video codec and AAC audio codec. I remux them before I put them onto Plex. (They are streamable before Plex gets them.)

I do this because I'm trying to eliminate any transcoding issues before they start. Plex has some different requirements for transcoding than other applications do. The only NAS Asustor makes that's capable of doing Plex 1080p transcodes consistently is the 70xx series. As the CPU specs drop the ability to transcode in Plex drops as well.

Check the link in my sig for more information on the relative power of the various CPU's in use within Asustor's NAS's. It will take you to a post I made on the Asustor subforum on Plex's forum.

Some folks here are using the LooksGood app as well, but, in my mind it has some very serious limitations, as well as a lack of client supported options. DLNA also seems to have a huge advocate group here, but it has even more limitations and does not provide a good user experience, IMO.

[Ubuntux]

I stream from my nas on local network with: NFS protocol to Raspberry pis with Openelec..
Outside network i use SMB to raspberry pis with openelec

Benefit. Same system on all clients.. Also just got an Android tablet, it runs XBMC/KODI so same system again.. I have tried Plex media server, but didnt like the transcoding and then plex had to much control.. and i had to little.. now im in full control and less work