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Hello everyone. I was wondering if there is a consistent agreement on which nas to purchase to direct play my 4k uhd rips with true HD audio (atmos) to my TV? I'm not really concerned about sending to other devices only my TV. I am open to other ideas as well but I just want a way to load up a hard drive with all my movies and play them in my home theater. I currently have a Sony xbr65x850d, Xbox one x, denon avr-x4500h, and firestick 4k. I just received my freindly uhd drive and am ready to start ripping but even after reading until my eyes bleed I'm not sure what the best route to take is.

The Direct Play "feature" totally depends on the playback device and how the Plex Client can utilize it and not on the device the Plex Media Server is running on. It is only kind of important if you want or have to Transcode.

On my computers I can play 4K UHD Blu-rays perfectly fine but if I use the Plex Web client it's either Direct Stream or Transcode. If I use the Plex Media Player on the same computers it's Direct Play.

You can test the playback capabilites of the Plex Client for your Sony TV. Install a Plex Media Server somewhere and the Plex Client on your TV. Play a file, ideally a "heavy" one (50 Mbps or higher, HDR, Dolby Atmos, etc.). If Direct Play is working you can get a cheap NAS.

The Xbox as well as PlayStation is known to have limits. The FireTV Stick 4K may be able to Direct Play. I "only" have a FireTV 4K 2nd Generation and that can Direct Play everything; however the 2nd Generation is less "stripped down" than the 3rd Generation devices.

If none of your devices is able to Direct Play but have to Transcode Audio you can get a cheap NAS too (but not the cheapest ones since transcoding needs CPU power).

If everything fails and you have to Transcode Video you either need a powerful NAS or one with Hardware Encoding support (which is only available with Plex Pass!). There is a spreadsheet with supported devices. See https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... jdj3tmMPc/

As you can see, not a single NAS is able to Transcode HDR 2160p using software and only a few are able to do using hardware BUT even those machines can only transcode to 1080p. The best solution is to find a player that can Direct Play everything, even if that player costs US$1,000 it's still much cheaper than buying a NAS with hardware encoding.

EDIT: I just tested it and as you can see 2160p Hardware Transcoding is actually supported. However HDR is not supported and there is no tonemapping.

I have 2 Amazon 4K FireTV's and neither will play rips directly. From what I now know, they will play 4K streams as they are suitably compressed but not a local 4K file in all its glory, however encoded. As above it's the client you need to concentrate on and my Nvidia Shield with Plex plays everything directly ie no encoding and is also very good with Kodi; h265 encoded seems to play better on that, Plex seems to occasionally drop frames/ stutter but I'm still learning too.