Quick (Maybe stupid question)

[Sootchucker 1]

HI all, a question I've been thinking about for some time. I currently use Emby as my main media streamer and usually via my Apple TV 4k onto my Samsung TV (apple TV and TV connected via HDMI 2.0). The source material is on a QNAP NAS in the loft and connected to the Apple TV etc to an unmanaged network switch via Gigabyte ethernet. It all works pretty well, but 95% or more of my source movies (over 1000 of them), are only in 1080p, with only a few still in the original 4k format. 

As the NAS is quite old, I'm looking to upgrade and it seems there's a lot made of hardware decoding (encoding) using the better CPU power of the later NAS's. My (hopefully) simple question is this. If I pull data from the NAS via ethernet to the Apple TV 4k, is the NAS doing the hardware decoding or the Apple TV ? I think what I'm trying to understand is does the better NAS hardware decoding of newer NAS's only really benefit the user if pulling the movies out of the NAS via their own HDMI connection on the back directly to a TV (i.e. using the NAS right next to the TV). If like me, the NAS is in a different room and serves the media to the final device (Apple TV) via ethernet, is it the last device that actually does the the hardware decoding ?

I hope that makes sense ?

[ebr 16169]

Hi.  The server's decoding capability would only come into play if items are transcoding.  If they are direct playing or direct streaming then the client hardware is processing it.

[Sootchucker 1]

Thanks ebr, so just for clarification, if I'm just streaming from the NAS to EMBY via the Apple TV, then it's the Apple TV that's doing the processing, but if I access EMBY remotely (say on my mobile via the EMBY app), then the NAS will do the hardware transcoding to deliver it in a format (and bandwidth) that the mobile phone can use for smooth playback ?

Edited December 16, 2020 by Sootchucker

[ebr 16169]

No, local or remote doesn't matter.  What matters is whether or not the item is transcoding.  That could happen for any number of reasons and not necessarily just remote.