How to Configure HDMI and Second Cat5 Socket when Connecting to a Smart TV

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At present I have my TS-264 Located in another Room, about 25m of Cat5 Cable away.

My Modem/Router Feeds to a 2.5GB Hub/Switch then Straight to my TV.

This all Works, however on some occasions I get network Lag when Watching a Movie.

All my Movies ( 2000 of them ) are back beside the Modem in the TS-264.

So I planed on Moving the Nas to Beside the TV, where I would only need about 500mm of Cat 5 Cable instead of 25m.

Plus Connecting the Nas to the TV via HDMI as well as Cat5.

One would have thought that having 1ft of cable ( Cat5 ) would be better than Say 100ft.

But I don’t think it works like that.

So I figured to Use the Cat5 for Normal Plex Communication and the HDMI for Video Playback.

By doing it this way I thought I would overcome network Lag and Perhaps better Video Quality.

Now if my thoughts are right, then I figured I would need to know how to tell plex to use the HDMI for Video and at the same time Adjust the System to Use the Cat 5 for normal Settings.

Also to save using another Hub can i take the network feed cable out of the TV and put it into the TS-264, then take a cat5 from the second socket on the ts-264 back to the tv.

Any help would be appreciated, CHEERS, John

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So any lag is not due to your ethernet cable. If you have a good cable, it can run for 100m or longer (100m is the spec). So your 25m is fine. I would say you have something else going on if you have network lag. Depending on what you are watching and if you are doing transcoding, your NAS may not be able to keep up. I doubt it is your network.

And plugging the HDMI cable into the TV will really gain you nothing. The only use it is for is in virtualization or for the HD Station. But QNAP’s HD Station is awful. You can’t play Plex movies over it. So don’t even go there.

If your video quality is bad - again - are you transcoding? I would bet you are and this is causing your problems. Look into that…

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Thanks for your Help. Transcoding, I’ll look into that. Now you say the hd station is awful, could you suggest another way of playing my movies.

As I mentioned earlier , I use Plex on my Smart TV to Play my Movies.

And it plays them via cat 5 from my TS-264.

If there is a better media player app ( or Hardware Box ) ( not to expensive, I am a Pensioner ), I would like to know about it.

I don’t get the pauze in Playback on every Movie I watch, just some times, out of the Blue.

I have a feeling it’s in Plex.

Or maybee somewhere along the Route from my Nas Box to the tV.

Thats one of the reasons I thought Attaching the Nas Box Directly to the TV via Hdmi, would Eliminate that Problem and give me better Picture Quality.

My Picture Quality at present is quite good, I just thought HDMI might Improve things.???.

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If the player app in your TV has issues with Plex playback, you can get a Chromecast, firestick,appletv, roku,etc and install the Plex client on that.

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Connecting an HDMI cable from your NAS to your TV would do little to improve picture quality. You wouldn’t be able to use Plex as HD Station uses a completely different playback format and you may have worse problems navigating things, etc. HD Station is frankly awful and I don’t know why anyone would want to use it. Believe me - I tried to make a go of it…

There’s likely zero issue in your network. I would have a hard time believing there’s any issue. Most videos are going to stream in the tens of megabits. You have more than a gigabit so it should not be a problem.

The 264 has a lower end Celeron that’s not a bad low end chip but it doesn’t have a lot of horsepower to do many things together well. If the NAS is busy doing other stuff like a backup, or similar and you are trying to play a movie (particularly with transcoding), you may very well have issues. I have a TS-451 and up until just over a year ago, it was my only NAS for a couple of years (heck I got it for free and fell in love with QNAP). That NAS has an older low end Intel chip that is less powerful than yours. I was having problems with streaming music to my Sonos system where songs would just stop and the next one would start to play. I decided I would buy a new NAS with more horsepower which led me to my TS-873A - slightly more powerful than yours but not by a huge amount. I have no issue streaming via Plex but I don’t do a lot of transcoding either.

I would turn transcoding off in Plex and see if you can play all your content natively. You likely can.

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Definitely a good next step.

Also, if there is any opportunity to try playing back “problematic” videos using a samba share and generic video player on the TV (or basic playback device such as a firestick, etc) then ruling out plex and/or transcoding (and potential resource issues on the NAS) would be a simple (and potentially cheap or even free) “fix”.

It also may depend on the source material (for instance is this a 4k file?). My personal preference for video is to run everything I have (29000+ tv episodes) through handbrake into a format I like, then I acess them through an old WD TV Live player and let my 4K TV upscale the image.

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:open_mouth:

Do you leave the house ever? I mean seriously have you watched 29,000 TV episodes?

:smiley:

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Could you please verify the IP addresses of both your NAS and the TV? Are they both on the same network segment (subnet)? (For example, both starting with 192.168.1.x).

Thanks!

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I’ve been collecting them for a while :slight_smile: It took about 7 months to run them through handbrake last year, but I went from 15TB used for video, down to 9TB.

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