Streamer recommendation needed

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iPhone household and looking to get rid of very aging Roku2 box. The main purpose it serves is to do photo slide show from the desktop. I have been using Plex for years but recently the Plex app on the Roku upgraded itself and is now giving me lot of trouble. Also video streaming from desktop has never really worked. It keeps on loading every 5 seconds.

After getting desparate, I tried Roku's default media player application. Surprisingly, it seems to be working much better than the Plex client now but still no video streaming of any 780p content as I suspect it does not have enough horsepower.

I don't care about the price of the new box but I refused to buy software to install on desktop or on the newly purchased box.

I thought AppleTV would be perfect but it does not come with native Apple developed DLNA client. After trying few free DLNA client apps available for AppleTV, I found a promising one (8player) but it is crippled and I do not want to pay for the paid version.

Amazon Firestick has Plex app but now Plex had left bad test in my mouth and I want truly native app which can do photo slide show and stream home videos.

I have no experience with Google Chrome stick and do not know what kind of native app it comes with.

My requirements are trivial but I have having hard time finding something :-

1) ability to setup DLNA server on the desktop so that I can point to a folder and all of that content be available on the purchased device hooked up to the TV
2) automatic photo slide show with ability to pause/back/forward via remote
3) Specified sort order - based upon when the photo was taken
4) Wide video format support with play/pause/seek support and ability to stream multiple video files from a folder

You would think, every app would do at least the above but you would be wrong! For example, VLC has no ability to do automates photo slide show. Plex client has no ability to have date based sort order.

On the server side, I am running both Plex Media Server and TVersity server. I was actually surprised that both can be run at the same time. I did not know that DLNA protocol has multi-port ability
 
Originally Posted by Vikas
Plex client has no ability to have date based sort order.
The option is there, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. Looks like it's a bug in the latest Plex app version on Roku.

Other than that, Plex actually works quite well for photo slideshows and movie playing/streaming on both my older Roku 3 and newer Roku Premiere+.

I typically keep my photos in separate folders and sort by folder/file name.
 
I have an Nvidia Shield which seems to be the powerhouse of the streamers...at least when I bought it. I don't know all the details on it, but check it out. There are sales on it occasionally and I got mine without the game controller for even less money.
 
The new Roku Ultra is pretty fast. For DLNA and any transcoding you will need a pretty fast PC and network as well. What are you running Tversity and Plex on?
 
how fast of a network do I need? if the PC can stream it locally, then it has enough horsepower, right?
 
Originally Posted by tmorris1
For DLNA and any transcoding you will need a pretty fast PC and network as well.

Good point. I was going to mention this, too. If the videos are in some weird format that Plex can't direct stream, then some decent PC hardware will be required for transcoding on server side.
 
Originally Posted by Vikas
if the PC can stream it locally, then it has enough horsepower, right?

Not necessarily. When you play it locally on your PC using something like VLC Player, then you are not transcoding because you have the necessary codecs on your PC.
On the other hand, when you play it via Plex on a remote device, depending on the format of the actual video, that video may need to be transcoded before it's sent up to the remote device. Transcoding process is resource intensive.
 
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