I'm dreaming of this: mini-nas connected direct to my tv via HDMI or USB. I think I'd want HMDI and let the nas handle streaming/decoding. But if my TV can handle enough formats. maybe USB will do.
anyone have experience with this?
I've been using a combination of media server on my Mac with client on Apple TV and I have no end of glitches.
It gets a lot of use in my household. I have my server (a headless Intel iGPU box) running it in docker with the Intel iGPU encoder passed through.
I let the iGPU default encode everything realtime, and now that plex has automatic subtitle sync, my main source of complaints is gone. I end up with a wide variety of formats as my wife enjoys obscure media.
One of the key things that helped a lot was segregating Anime to it own TV collection so that anime specific defaults can be applied there.
You can also run a client on one of these machines directly, but then you are dealing with desktop Linux.