NAS for streaming 4K content

[Jelledenkik]

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum aswell as new to all the NAS systems so I was hoping I could get some advice here.

Next week my brand new 4K TV (LG 55UB850V) is coming in. I want to have a NAS sort of system on which I can store some 4K content and then open it from my TV through the network.

My question: Can I just take any nas to accomplish this or do I need a specific nas due to the read/write speed? (network is 1GB/s) And do I need a specific nas so that the TV can read the files from the NAS directly?

Many thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Jelle

 

[AcostaJA]

It depends more on your movies format than NAS performance, 1 gb ethernet provides enough bandwidth for multiple 4k streams, you only issue maybe with resolution upscale, while there are new NAS aimed at multimedia capable of upscale content resolution, they are restricted to Full HD 1080p. Beyond that nothing yet.

 

[mdgm]

AcostaJA makes some good points.

Playing on your TV
For streaming to the TV over your network you could use e.g. DLNA etc.

From what AcostaJA said it doesn't sound like current NAS models have a new enough version of HDMI to support 4k. If you want to play video directly from the NAS via HDMI and use an older HDMI version it's not going to output it at 4k (it may try to upscale 1080p but that's not as good). Note both the HDMI port (on the NAS and on the TV) and the cable used needs to support the required version to fully support 4K.

Does your TV have HDMI 2.0 ports?

Consequently streaming over a wired network may give you better picture quality. You could compare the two methods.

If you wish to play on other devices on your network

If you want to stream your video to any wireless devices on your network e.g. an iPad you would need to transcode (convert video on the fly to a format that can be played back on the device) 4k video. A lot of wired devices wouldn't play 4k natively so you could have to transcode even for some of those. If you do need to transcode to play on some devices you would be looking at top of the range desktop NAS models if you want that. I'm not sure if even the top of the range NAS models out there would be able to transcode 4k or not.

Alternatively you could convert the 4k videos to another format. Use the 4k video for the wired devices you can stream to that can play back the video natively and the lower quality video files for everything else.

Another option would be store the videos on the NAS but use a fast PC to handle the transcoding when needed.

 

[LenMargaux]

Hi Jelledenkik
I know this reply is very late but there are already NAS that supports 4K transcoding on the fly. An example is the recently announced vNAS from QNAP. I just came across one here: http://thepcenthusiast.com/qnap-tvs-x71-series-turbo-vnas-released/
Hope this helps