Plex HTPC suggestions?

Afryingpan16 · September 27, 2018

Hey guys,

I've been using my Xbox One to playback my Blu-ray rips which all have DTS audio. I just realized that the XB1 doesn't support DTS playback when it is through an MKV file. (Wth Micro$oft) It only supports DTS Audio when playing back Blu-ray disks, otherwise the audio from my PC is transcoded to AAC. And from my research it seems Microsoft will not be adding support for this anytime soon.

Anyways I want to be able to play my files at full lossless quality. I could get an Nvidia Shield TV but those run upwards of $200 in Canada.

For that price I was thinking of building an HTPC to just directly hook-up to my receiver. That way I can move my 8TBs of drives off my gaming PC and to a dedicated computer while I'm at it.

Would an i5 4670 (non K) 8gb RAM be able to handle playing 4K video filesvia Plex directly to my TV? Would I need to invest in a video card for the PC or upgrade to an i7?

Any tips for playing lossless quality files through Plex would be appreciated

Xcelsior86 · September 27, 2018

The i5 should be able to handle that without issue. My Plex server is an i3 and it can stream two 1080p streams without issue so I'm sure an i5 could handle 4k locally. I would recommend getting a dedicated video card for 4k, but you probably don't need a 1080 like you would for gaming. I think a 1060 would be sufficient for this purpose. Video card will give you a much better picture than on board video as well.

tikker · September 28, 2018

I have a 4690k running my Plex server at the moment (no GPU). As long as you don't need to transcode 4k it'll handle it fine (so DirectPlay or DirectStream), but so would a lot less powerful hardware as well, since DirectPlaying something costs very little resources.

JZStudios · September 30, 2018

I'm curious what your sound system setup is. Do you have a newer or high end smart TV? We just have a regular ol hard drive plugged into the TV via USB and play back from there. Our TV is cheap though so it doesn't output sound over HDMI...

I think we can also just stream it from a shared network folder from the PC.

tikker · October 2, 2018

On 9/30/2018 at 10:54 AM, JZStudios said:

I'm curious what your sound system setup is. Do you have a newer or high end smart TV? We just have a regular ol hard drive plugged into the TV via USB and play back from there. Our TV is cheap though so it doesn't output sound over HDMI...

I think we can also just stream it from a shared network folder from the PC.

Me or OP? I'm guessing just XBONE > AVR > TV where the AVR splits audio and video?