[hyg71886]

I'm currently building a home theater room but will also have a TV in my great room, lounge upstairs, and game room. I'd like to be able to stream my content whether its 4k or anything to all 4 spots via Lan. I have plex lifetime pass (since 2012) but will be using kodi in my theater as I prefer it to plex. If I put kodi on all the devices would I need to transcode at all? Should I install to mini pc's or to firesticks? I was thinking of housing all content on Asustor Lockerstor 10 AS6510T gen 2. Everything in my house will be hardwired. I'd appreciate any suggestions as I'm trying to catch some sales and purchase equipment now.

[izprtxqkft]

you left a lot to unpack here, let me see if i can leave some thoughts on some of it

re: plex
no clue, don't use it, don't know if you can make it not transcode
 

Should I install to mini pc's or to firesticks?

neither, there are better devices on offer, check this thread https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035
 

 Asustor Lockerstor 10 AS6510T gen 2

has a 2 year old ryzen embedded cpu so not my first pick https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ry...dded_v3c14

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you may want to make sure from the plex forum
- that you can disable transcoding entirely
- that the cpu you're choosing can do transcoding in the case you decide you want a dual client environment where lower devices use a native plex client with transcoding and only the home theater room doesn't

or from the asus forum that the nas you're choosing has good support for network file protocols

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i have a similar setup that you are doing
- nas server with media server+nfs
- multi clients

home theater loads everything directly from the server via nfs, means better quality for the home theater but maintaining 2 libraries so i do everything with nfos
other android clients use the media server (fire tv cube gen3) via the native app for the media server with only occasional audio transcoding so it's very light work on the server
mobile clients (phones, tablets) for the media server enjoy full transcoding which the server uses an intel ARC gpu for

so mixed clients for me is the way things work best, currently

[izprtxqkft]

actually

for a NAS look into the UGreen NASync and see if it suits you

pro it's cheaper
pro it's not locked to a proprietary NAS OS, you can install Debian+Docker natively

assuming of course you actually want to have a full linux server, otherwise the NAS OS it includes may be a con

[Littletycoon]

You can go so many routes, also a windows based NAS could do easily. On the player side you can choose from discussions on many threads here. Am6b + and homematics 4k seem to be excellent contenders due to Dolby Vision support and being not expensive for reasonable hardware --> transcoding not necessary.

You could run plex on server side with e.g. plex for kodi addon. Other alternatives could be jellyfin or emby server. It depends a bit on your ecosystem preferences.

For some reason emby/plex addons never really stuck with me, maybe because at that time performance was not 100%.

I ended up with windows based server with 11th generation core i5 because of additional tooling relevant for me on the server side has best availability on windows. I use Maria db/sql database on the server as central library database (not so difficult to setup if you follow the kodi wiki), seamless library management from Kodi, connecting to server via smb, so no transcoding, not necessary. On the player box side 1Nuc windows, 1nuc librelec, 1 odroid n2 with core elec, 1 cable operator android box with kodi installed and 2tv's with kodi webos (sucks a bit due to audio issues).

So in summary, you have many options.

[Littletycoon]

P.S. with central Maria DB/SQL database all libraries on the player/box side are in sync.

[hyg71886]

Hey everyone wow thanks for your replies, so what I thought would be a good idea. Currently I have a 5800x, 32gb ram, 5 wd red pro 18tb drives, ASRock X570 Pro 4 mobo. I thought to myself why not just get a different case and have at it. I ordered a https://www.newegg.com/p/2AM-00GU-000Y9?...4REK0N5705 from newegg. I'm also gonna order another 18tb hdd to copy all my data off the drives so they can be wiped. Then install truenas and copy everything over. I also ordered a nvidia shield pro and will put kodi on it with plex embedded. What do you think of the plan? I also have a 10gig nic in but will get one with dual ports as I will be doing photo and video work from it. Any more suggestions to the plan? Also I will NOT be installing anything not meant to be on kodi, just the things I actually have so any front end recommendations for theater would be awesome. I will be installing disney plus, amazon video, paramount plus, espn plus, and netflix on it also

[izprtxqkft]

What do you think of the plan?

sounds like a good solid starting point and inexpensive
something like this is always modular based on how needs change

i don't have any alterations, just get it up and running then make adjustments that suit you (if any)

[jbinkley60]

Hey everyone wow thanks for your replies, so what I thought would be a good idea. Currently I have a 5800x, 32gb ram, 5 wd red pro 18tb drives, ASRock X570 Pro 4 mobo. I thought to myself why not just get a different case and have at it. I ordered a https://www.newegg.com/p/2AM-00GU-000Y9?...4REK0N5705 from newegg. I'm also gonna order another 18tb hdd to copy all my data off the drives so they can be wiped. Then install truenas and copy everything over. I also ordered a nvidia shield pro and will put kodi on it with plex embedded. What do you think of the plan? I also have a 10gig nic in but will get one with dual ports as I will be doing photo and video work from it. Any more suggestions to the plan? Also I will NOT be installing anything not meant to be on kodi, just the things I actually have so any front end recommendations for theater would be awesome. I will be installing disney plus, amazon video, paramount plus, espn plus, and netflix on it also

I but a setup similar to yours with around 15 Kodi and non-Kodi clients.   I went with Mezzmo, which runs on Windows and has a number of different transcoding options including being able to enable/disable by client, by media type or you can pretranscode if you'd like.  I disable transcoding for my Kodi clients and pretranscode some videos for my Roku clients.  I run the Mezzmo Kodi addon which provides a seamless Kodi experience and unlikesome of  the central SQL DB solutions you can run different versions of Kodi at the same time and share bookmarks, playcounts etc.  and you don't have to mess with NFS / SMB file shares to your clients.  The Mezzmo Kodi addon has a number of additional features to make Kodi a better Kodi client.  What makes the addon nice is that you can run native and GUI mode at the same time and easily switch between the two, if desired. 

I know a number of folks running nVidia Shields with Kodi and the Mezzmo Kodi addon.  I run a multitude of different clients myself.  Another nice feature of Mezzmo is you simply install Kodi, the addon and then the background sync process takes care of everything else.  I can setup or rebuild a Kodi client in a few minutes.  This gets to one of the main attractions for Mezzmo to me, next to no maintenance.   I want to spend more time watching movies and TV shows and listening to music. (as well as not hearing the wife and grandchild complain  )

I run my own server too with over 500TB of storage.  I went with inexpensive Highpoint RAID controllers and have used them for 10+ years.  I've continually added drives and reconfigured things over time.  The nice thing here is that I can rearrange things on the server and the clients never have to be touched.  With Mezzmo and this approach I can add storage, extend logical volumes across drives and much more and the clients see no changes.
 
Good luck on you journey here and whatever you decide.  The beauty of the Kodi ecosystem is that there are many choices on how to build your personal media solution and many folks here to help.


Thanks,

Jeff

[hyg71886]

Wow I read about it that actually sounds pretty cool. So did you go that route instead of using true nas? If so what did you do for remote access?

[jbinkley60]

Wow I read about it that actually sounds pretty cool. So did you go that route instead of using true nas? If so what did you do for remote access?

I like all the capabilities of Mezzmo including its very powerful library management tools and I've written some powerful artwork and trailer management tools.  I never touch Kodi to scrape metadata and no user can mess things up from a Kodi client.  I also don't mess with SMB / NFS shares and similar across many different platforms and OS systems.  It is the most flexible solution I am aware of.  I became so impressed with it that I volunteered to take over the coding for the Mezzmo Kodi addon.   I've been maintaining it for the past few years and release software updates monthly.  Here's the release updates. 

My library has around 37,000 video and music files.  Here's a performance test running 6 clients with a mix of wired, wireless, 4K and 1080P streams running simultaneously.  I also have some relative performance stats for various endpoint clients I've personally tested. 

The Kodi support forum for the Mezzmo Kodi addon is here.


Thanks,

Jeff

[hyg71886]

Wow I read about it that actually sounds pretty cool. So did you go that route instead of using true nas? If so what did you do for remote access?

I like all the capabilities of Mezzmo including its very powerful library management tools and I've written some powerful artwork and trailer management tools.  I never touch Kodi to scrape metadata and no user can mess things up from a Kodi client.  I also don't mess with SMB / NFS shares and similar across many different platforms and OS systems.  It is the most flexible solution I am aware of.  I became so impressed with it that I volunteered to take over the coding for the Mezzmo Kodi addon.   I've been maintaining it for the past few years and release software updates monthly.  Here's the release updates. 

My library has around 37,000 video and music files.  Here's a performance test running 6 clients with a mix of wired, wireless, 4K and 1080P streams running simultaneously.  I also have some relative performance stats for various endpoint clients I've personally tested. 

The Kodi support forum for the Mezzmo Kodi addon is here.


Thanks,

Jeff

Thanks for that I can't figure out how to create an account. I was going to add it to the server then add the add on in Kodi

[jbinkley60]

Thanks for that I can't figure out how to create an account. I was going to add it to the server then add the add on in Kodi

Sorry.  I am not following,  an account for what ?   The Kodi clients autodiscover the Mezzmo servers and the Mezzmo servers build device profiles.  You'll want to change the device profile to Kodi since Kodi isn't often automatically recognized by the Kodi signature.   The Mezzmo Kodi addon will do your autodiscovery better than Kodi natively. 

Just follow the setup instructions here.



Thanks,

Jeff