TS-453B?

[Enquiries]

Hello Rob,

Firstly lel me thank and congrat you. I cannot tell how useful I am finding all your blogs and videos.

I have recently started on this NAS great world and decided to move forward with my first one.

Basically I would be using it for back-up, (PLEX) Media Server & download manager but I do not discard extend my views and leverage all the possibilities I might have within this price range NAS.

Upon doing some research I would like to go for a TS-453B (I found it at 605€). Originally I was thinking about a TS-453Be but I found the TS-453B at same price :-O.

My main concern comes with the PLEX media server topic. I got a quite new LG OLED C9 TV as the main (if not only) device to watch my media so from my understanding I should not be really worried about trasncoding since the TV supports a huge variety of formats.

I am quite picky with the image quality so I would like to keep on watching my media in 4k UHD (ideally 10bits H265 & H264). Not to mention the audio, which I would love to keep on enjoying in Dolby ATMOS.

Looks like not a big deal since, as mentioned above, the TV should support all of that via PLEX client app (over a 1Gbps network) and enabling Direct Play/Stream. However, something just stoppped me from buying the TS-453B... subtitles. I watch my movies in English with Spanish subtitles and I would like to keep it as such. I read that Plex needs to transcode so to insert the subtitles, so at this point I am just worried that the transcode feature of the TS-453B would be a pain when tryint to reach those image formats natively supported by my TV.

So, basically:
1. Shoudl I wait for a TS-453D (whenever it comes and expecting that the price range will be similar)?
2. Am I making an issue on something that can be easily solved? (I read Plex Pass supports subtitles download)
3. Which HDD would you recommend? I got an eye on quite basic ones (3TB ST3000VN007 Seagate IronWolf / 3TB WD30EFRX WD RED) but not sure if I should go for higher rank ones with more than 64MB cache

Thanks in advance!

[ed]

The issue is not with the Plex server but an App on the TV. It is limited to what it can or can not do. And subtitles seem to require transcoding. Not very smart app. Even new 453D would not be able to transcode 4K fast enough. You may need 72XT or 882 series for that or even TS-473 with additional GPU fro this.But I would recommend to experiment and find out which formats your TV app will support. There might be some of the 4K it does.I would still pick a 53B series in your case.I hope this helps.