Haywood, I'd also love to know your thoughts on sharing content. I used a fairly potent NAS box for my Plex server at home so I'd have good RAID and enough CPU to transcode if I wanted to, but was going to get it up and running well before deciding how to handle my vacation house.
I figured worst case I could do another NAS box and setup replication between the two under NAS. I'd do the initial replication on my local network and then take the vacation house server up there (the connection up there is pretty mediocre).
But how well does the sync between Plex friends work? If it's good then I could maybe just use a Shield as the remote server? Issue there would be enough storage, but I think that's solvable.
--Donnie
My Plex server is a QNAP TS-853 Pro 8-Bay NAS with a quad-core 2.0Ghz Celeron and 8GB DDR3. I'm running eight 4TB HGST NAS drives in RAID 6 for a total of about 21.5TB of usable storage. I can handle a limited amount of transcoding, but not enough to transcode from 1:1 Blu-Ray rips. That's why I use the Optimizer to create more streaming friendly versions.
My household has four people and quite a few streaming devices, including two Roku 3 boxes, a Roku TV, an Android TV, a Samsung Smart TV, an Android tablet, an Amazon Fire tablet, an iPad, a PS3, a Windows laptop, an iPhone and two Android phones (there may also be a partridge in a pear tree).
I also share my Plex server with my parents, my sister's family, my wife's brother and my best friend. My parents and sister are heavy users. All they have in their house in New Hampshire are Roku 3 boxes. None of the people using my server have a server of their own. They have their own Plex accounts and I share my server with those accounts. That means they all get their own queue and so forth. This mainly works, because I am on FiOS and have a 75Mbps upload speed.
Plex has a feature called Sync. You can download content to your mobile devices anyplace where you have internet access. I believe that you can use sync to store stuff locally on a Shield as well, but you might want to verify that. You could theoretically use both your NAS and the Shield as servers. You could load up a drive with content from your NAS, plug it into the Shield when you get to the other end and use that. You could also have your Shield use the Sync feature to pull down local copies of other media from your server, thus avoiding the need to subject your viewing to variable connection speeds.
I recommend checking out the Plex forums to verify this, but I am pretty sure it would work.