If you have been following the thread, about 3 years ago, I bit the bullet and built a Plex server. A simple Intel NUC with a Core i5 CPU, 8 gigs of ram, and a 300gig SSD inside, and a big spinning rust external drive hanging on it.
I digitized all my media, and it worked well.
However, in the interim, what I use to stream from it has gotten squiffy.
I have a TIvo Roamio, and it worked well, but it struggles with the streams from blu ray disks (high bandwidth, and this leads to stuttering), and as much as it pains me to admit it, there are some weirdnesses to the user interface. The irony: Tivo was heralded as a genius interface when it was originally launched in the 1990’s.
I also have a Panasonic smart TV, but with a recent OS update on my Plex box, it no longer connects. I haven’t been successful in figuring out why, but it might be that Comcast has now pushed IPv6 into my home network (yay, it is about damn time), and the TV is older, and seems to not connect to the IPv4 secondary configuration. Grrr.
So, I am looking for a simple box to stream. Roku, AppleTV, or something similar. I am pretty thoroughly an Apple person, so I am tilting that way, but the Roku Ultra seems to be a solid contender as well. Time for some research.
So, I suspect I will be investing in one of these in the near future.