Question Upgrading to 4K

mda1974

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Hi

I currently shot a lot of home video on my iPhone and iPad and edit it in iMovie (although just upgraded to LumaFusion) and enjoy being able to watch this content on all our TVs using an Apple TV.

I'm about to upgrade to a 4K TV so thought I might as well start to shoot in 4K too. The Apple TV doesn't support 4K so I'm looking for an alternative.

I'm thinking some sort of NAS drive but it solidly need to be in a format that would be compatible with the TV and my mac. Any suggestions?

Thanks
 
Personally I'd buy a streamer that does 4K in the format that you shoot films on and just use the NAS to serve data.

Do you really want a NAS sitting next to your TV clicking and whirring away?
Very few of them have an HDMI out limiting your options to only a QNAP I believe and they don't officially support Kodi anymore AFAIK.
 
Cheers for the quick reply.
I was thinking of having the drive somewhere separate and using the TV's network connection to stream to it.
 
If you did that you'd be using DNLA which has a lot of issues with format types, you'd be relying on the TV rather than the NAS playing the formats you want.

You would also just have a list of files with no real GUI.
 
For clarity - if you intend to use NAS only as data storage, it doesn't have to be "compatible" with the video format you use - data is data is data, it's irrelevant to the NAS what it is (video, spreadsheets, computer programmes, etc.) so you won't see things like "4K compatible" in NAS specs.

What matters is that the NAS has enough capacity to store the volume of data you intend (big enough discs) is fast enough to serve up the files timely enough to sustain playback and that it offers a network sharing mechanism your playback devices can interact with - basically, CIFS/SMB and/or NFS depending on you playback device (widely supported) and increasing DLNA.

Your playback devices reach across the network to the NAS and "pull" the data that they need from NAS as they require it (it's not "pushed" from the NAS to the playback device) using the desired network transport (CIFS/SMB/NFS/DLNA) then the playback device has to "render" the data into sound and pictures. The "comparability" issues tend to be about whether the playback device can interpret the data successfully, as discussed in previous posts.

And of course, the network infrastructure between NAS and playback device can cause problems if it's not fast enough and reliable enough. "Proper" wired ethernet (preferably Gigabit) would be best - Wi-Fi and Homeplugs can work well enough, but are somewhat less robust - there's a lot of "it depends" factors affecting how the latter two perform.
 
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