deatils….yes I am a Plex pass member. The client as said above is my Samsung tv q80 something. Uses the Plex App. It’s hard wired to my network. It’s a gigabit network. Media doesn’t matter whether I stream a 4k film, a 1080p film, audio files (mp3), or old school 480p files . I always stream native. Gpu acceleration I don’t use as it was found to decrease video quality (I’ll see if I can find the link again).
Decreasing stream quality makes no difference. Streaming to my lapto via wireless and hard wired makes no difference
Laptop is a HP Omen from 2021.
Details - file container, audio and video stream(s), etc...
Stream native - what does this mean?
Q80 - is that the specific model? there's a Q80, Q80A, Q80T (at least). But, nowhere have I found what file types this TV can support.
- The file types supported by the TV will tell you what you can expect from the TV and Plex when they handshake at the beginning of playback.
- For instance, you have a .mkv with x265 video and DTS 5.1 surround stream
1) Assume the Q80 supports both of these
a) Assume the CLIENT settings are configured to allow direct playback and direct streams
There should be no trandcoding of the video, direct stream only, and very little workload on server
2) Assume the Q80 doesn't support x265 video (but supports legacy x264), but supports DTS 5.1 surround sode
a) Assume same client settings as before
b) The server would transcode x265 to x264 and direct stream the audio
Just a couple examples to think about.
Also, you'll want to double check what speed that LAN port actually runs at. The specs on Samsung's site don't say. I suspect it's 10/100 because most users just use wifi anyways. 10/100 should be enough, but it could be buggy. So try out wifi and see what happens.
only way for me to try kodi out is to put it on An Amazon fire stick. It gets delivered tomorrow.
Edit -
youtube demonstration showing the decrease in quality. Granted it’s old, but I havent seen any notes from the developers addressing the issue.
Kodi runs on all sorts of devices. Pickup a Raspberry Pi, you'll probably like it better. I personally don't like firesticks, here's why:
1) First firestick was a few years ago, it was VERY sluggish. I mean 5 seconds to wait everytime I pushed a button. I disabled anything and everything possibly to speed it up, it's just simply underpowered
2) Bought a 4K Max firestick this year (due to the contrast playback issues with the newer roku ultra's). I was pleased to see that the 4K max was much snappier and played back my files without the contrast issue. However, software wise was annoying AF. The plex app behaved oddly on a regular basis, and performing simple tasks like closing Spotify and opening plex seemed to confuse the device. It wouldn't kill the spotify audio stream without a reboot of the device. Needless to say, I returned it also.
My son and I demo'd a raspberry pi running kodi, used a xbox 360 usb dongle and 360 controller to control it on the tv. It played back files with better quality than the plex app did.
Next, like
@aigomorla said, you will need to babysit it to see what's going on real time. I tend to use the Plex dashboard on my phone while I test stuff because I have multiple devices around the house that I play around with, and don't always go back to my pc.