I am considering adding my Plex server instead of direct shares to the NAS because of the control over Metadata this would give me.
I was wondering though:
Does using plex though infuse have any kind of disadvantages compared to direct smb shares from a NAS? Is the sound and picture quality the same on the same network?
It’s the same. In some cases plex might be faster than SMB/NFS depending on your setup. I believe the only thing that doesn’t work is ISO however if you only get a few of these you can always create a folder specifically for ISOs and share that out via SMB.