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Best way to set up file sharing

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OBENZ

Regular Contributor
I'm having trouble setting up my Plex media server in a sense there's a bottleneck somewhere but can't figure out where. I have 2 powered USB drives hooked to my 86U and 2 others hooked to a Minix (android box with gbit). When I play files on the Lining running Kodi, all the files play fine even the ones on the shared network. However when I read through Plex, everything buffers when it's a 4k file. I have enabled samba on my 86u and set it to smbv2 but I dunno how it impacts reading speeds
 
I'm having trouble setting up my Plex media server in a sense there's a bottleneck somewhere but can't figure out where. I have 2 powered USB drives hooked to my 86U and 2 others hooked to a Minix (android box with gbit). When I play files on the Lining running Kodi, all the files play fine even the ones on the shared network. However when I read through Plex, everything buffers when it's a 4k file. I have enabled samba on my 86u and set it to smbv2 but I dunno how it impacts reading speeds
Invest in a NAS. Router not a great tool for file storage.
 
What does "Lining" mean?

What machine is running the Plex server? What machine has the Plex client?
Hahahaha no Idea what a Lining is but from my Minix is what I meant.
Plex server is running on the nvidia shield tv and the client is running on the shield as well.
I performed in perf3 across all devices and I'm getting 400-500mbs so I'm not sure what's causing this issue
 
The issue I had with Plex, which is why I stopped using it, is that for most media it would try/need to transcode it to be compatible with the display device. This caused unacceptable buffing because the hardware the Plex server was running on just wasn't powerful enough. That had nothing to do with network speeds or where/how the media files were stored. Sure you can disable transcoding in the Plex server options but then you still have compatibility issues with the display device in my experience.

Moving to Kodi was a much better solution because it doesn't use Plex's client/server design and the video processing is much more efficient.
 
The issue I had with Plex, which is why I stopped using it, is that for most media it would try/need to transcode it to be compatible with the display device. This caused unacceptable buffing because the hardware the Plex server was running on just wasn't powerful enough. That had nothing to do with network speeds or where/how the media files were stored. Sure you can disable transcoding in the Plex server options but then you still have compatibility issues with the display device in my experience.

Moving to Kodi was a much better solution because it doesn't use Plex's client/server design and the video processing is much more efficient.

Yea I have both Kodi and Plex but I prefer Plex. Transcoding is not the issue as far as the issue goes as it's direct playing both the video and audio but I'm suspecting the server is not using the full available bandwidth for some reason. Anyway, I know this isn't a place to talk about Plex but was just wondering about the router performance in regard to file sharing and the smb performance as well
 
If you experience the same issue when sourcing media files from the Minix drives then that indicates the issue is probably with the Nvidia shield. As others have said, using the router as a NAS is a poor choice but that's normally only an issue for writing large amounts of data. Reading data via SMB shouldn't be a problem. Can you test an SMB file transfer from the router to the Nvidia shield.

EDIT: Actually you already said that there's no problem reading the files off the router via SMB using kodi so we know that router isn't the problem.
 
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If you experience the same issue when sourcing media files from the Minix drives then that indicates the issue is probably with the Nvidia shield. As others have said, using the router as a NAS is a poor choice but that's normally only an issue for writing large amounts of data. Reading data via SMB shouldn't be a problem. Can you test an SMB file transfer from the router to the Nvidia shield.

EDIT: Actually you already said that there's no problem reading the files off the router via SMB using kodi so we know that router isn't the problem.

What I tested,

Using Kodi on the Minix every single file plays without a hiccup
Using Kodi on the shield large 4k hdr files from both the Minix and router buffers every 10secs
Using Plex on all my devices , 4k hdr rips exhibit same buffering behavior.
Be it Ethernet or Wifi the nvidia shield tv suffers from buffering , not sure if it's the network interface weakness or something else but yea looks like router is not the issue
 

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