I was wondering if anyone had experience with this or if they saw any potential problems with trying to do this.
I have a low power unraid server running plex (posted on the forums here, if you’re interested) and I’m trying to stream large (~50gb) 4k files to a new 4k tv (TCL). The server is too slow to encode them on the fly to something the TV can handle, and the TV doesn’t seem to have the gusto to take them in “original” quality from the plex server.
My thought was that I could use an Nvidia Shield, and that it may have the horsepower to properly play the 4k files to the TV. I think this will work, but wanted to float it to the good people of the forums first to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
I also use Unraid, though don’t have any 4k content on it yet. I always convert everything to mp4 and don’t generally have issues playing anything back be it a cell phone or whatever. I agree with alpha and give this a try first.
Use Handbrake and encode your 4k files to H.265. You can compress them some without loosing quality if you play with the settings. The Nvidia Shield has a native H.265 hardware decoder. It shouldn’t have any problems decoding the stream for playback. I have some 4k content but haven’t bought a 4k tv yet and my Shield doesn’t have any trouble down sampling the files to play on a standard 1080p TV.
I friend of mine sent me some video files encoded with H.265 and my Plex server wouldn’t play them, kept getting an incompatible video file error. I had to re-encode them in H264 before they would work.
Plex is compatible with H.265. There may have been a problem with the files themselves or your box doesn’t have enough power to transcode them. I’ve been encoding and playing H.265 files with Plex for a couple of years. Any player with a native H.265 decoder like the Shield should be able to play them also. You would be moving the decoding to player and taking the load off the server.
I’m going to try to avoid transcoding if at all possible… But that makes sense that I’ll probably need to transcode onto something that the shield can handle (ordered one).
I’ll post an update once I have everything up and running… I’m also wondering if I can game steam from my PC through the shield to an Oculus (CAN I, and then does it introduce so much additional latency that I vomit all over my dining room )… I’ll update as I push forward!
