How is the new Raspberry Pi 4 for Infuse for 4K HDR (ATV4K)?

I’m very new to video streaming and I’m considering a cheap and cheerful home built solution after looking at the costs of dropbox for only 2TB.

I’ve learned so far that Infuse > Plex because no transcoding is required, so I don’t need a powerful box or anything. So I’d like to try infuse!

The new RPi4 apparently has proper gigabit ethernet this time around. Would one of these for the server with a a couple of 4TB SSDs plugged into it be enough for streaming movies or would the USB be a bottleneck? I’m aiming at being able to stream 4K HDR via the Infuse app on Apple TV 4K.

If not, are there any alternative ‘cheap’ solutions around like this (ODROID??)? Any special requirements for the hard drive(s) as I’d have to go out and buy one?

Also I’ve never had a NAS or done anything to do with RAID, but I saw someone suggested having a RAID set up (one for search and one for playing or something)? How necessary is this?

Thanks in advance!

To be quite honest the amount of time and effort to setup a pi4 as a media server and then to deal with any issue that may pop up just isn’t worth it. I’d recommend saving your money and buying a Cheap two drive synology NAS (mirrored drives) or a 4 bay NAS and go that route. The raid is automatic and the 4 bay NAS units allow you to start out with two drives and then add more later on when you want to expand.

I’m guessing you have some sort of router for your home network, why not see if you can just connect a hard drive or two directly to it and share it that way without the added hassle? Linksys has this capability as do many others.

That would get you through till you can afford a dependable NAS.

Actually it’s extremely simple to make a raspberry pi into a NAS. Just load up your favorite Kodi build like like Xbian or openelec, and enable SMB server in the menu. That’s it! Or even better yet, load an OPENMEDIAVAULT image onto your pi, and it’s an instant home NAS. Keep in mind that the Pi4 just came out, some many of these build images are still in beta. Give it a few months for them to have stable builds.

According to reviews, the Pi4 can now handle 100MB/s of file transfers, which nearly saturates an gigabit connection. 4k video should be fine for streaming.

The problem is your choice of hardware, 4TB of SSD’s is crazy expensive ($400 each). I’d rather buy a couple magnetic hard drives of similar capacity and put them in raid. This is not really possible with a raspberry pi however. You’re better off buying a cheap ARM nas and using that as a file server. You don’t have to be an expert in RAID, the NAS software does all the work for you.

A 4 bay QNAP 451+ is $380 at newegg right now, and 4TB wd red drives are $120 each at newegg.com. I would buy the 451+ and three 4TB drives and put them in Raid 5 for $740. This will give you 1 disk failure protection and 8TB of storage space. At a later date, if you need more space you can add another 4TB hard drive to give you 12TB.

Many home routers, even higher end home routers, struggle to deliver >30MB/s using the built in samba server. 4k would be a struggle for many home routers. The raspberry pi 4 is cheap ($35) and would actually be better than most home routers.