alt Hacker Newsthanks for the article.
I'm dreaming of this: mini-nas connected direct to my tv via HDMI or USB. I think I'd want HMDI and let the nas handle streaming/decoding. But if my TV can handle enough formats. maybe USB will do.
anyone have experience with this?
I've been using a combination of media server on my Mac with client on Apple TV and I have no end of glitches.
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Streaming (e.g., Plex or Jellyfin or some UPnP server) helps you send the data to the TV client over the network from a remote server.
As you want to bring the data server right to the TV, and you'll output the video via HDMI, just use any PC. There are plenty of them designed for this (usually they're fanless for reducing noise)... search "home theater PC."
You can install Kodi as the interface/organizer for playing your media files. It handles the all the formats... the TV is just the ouput.
A USB CEC adapter will also allow you to use your TV remote with Kodi.
Just get a nvidia shield. It plays pretty much anything still even though a fairly old device. Your aim should not be to transcode but to just send data when it comes to video.
I've been running Plex on my AppleTV 4k for years with few issues.
It gets a lot of use in my household. I have my server (a headless Intel iGPU box) running it in docker with the Intel iGPU encoder passed through.
I let the iGPU default encode everything realtime, and now that plex has automatic subtitle sync, my main source of complaints is gone. I end up with a wide variety of formats as my wife enjoys obscure media.
One of the key things that helped a lot was segregating Anime to it own TV collection so that anime specific defaults can be applied there.
You can also run a client on one of these machines directly, but then you are dealing with desktop Linux.