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MrMister111

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 28, 2009
3,900
382
UK
Interested in a new Apple TV but rather than leave my iMac on all the time to stream Plex looks good for being an app and server to stream all my movies. I'd prefer my NAS to do this as its always on.

At the moment I have a Buffalo Linkstation live NAS, it's an older model, I'm not sure but believe you can add Plex server to it? (Currently it has DLNA twonky on it). Or I'm happy to buy, if not to expensive, a new NAS.

So can anyone help with either my current NAS or a new NAS. As I've said I don't really want my iMac on all the time and prefer anyway to store my movies etc on a NAS rather than a HDD connected to my iMac anyway.

Thanks
 
I'd be a little surprised if you find an easy answer to this. The appeal of an app like Plex or Air Video is that those programs can take care of all transcoding issues for you. They just present you with a list of all of your content and play any of it by transcoding it on the fly. I'm not sure a stand-alone NAS is going to be powerful enough to do this very well. And the ATV can't do the transcoding for you. This was one of the primary reasons I gave up my NAS years ago and converted my iMac to my de-facto NAS with a large external drive connected to it.

Plex even has a support article on this very issue.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201373823-NAS-Devices-and-Limitations
 
or you can wait for Kodi.

if ATV 2 with Kodi can transcode, ATV 4 can do it with ease. then you don't have to worry about having a powerful server/NAS.
 
Not too bothered on the ability to be able to transcode as most stuff is in Apple format anyway.

The NAS in that article are beast machines, was hoping a more consumer friendly worked...
 
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