I think I’ve finally done it! I’ve come to love Plex!
My QNAP NAS has been upgraded to an i7 3770S (from an i3) so has more than enough power to do the job along with 16GB RAM (although it also runs a couple of VM’s so it’s not all for Plex).
The ATV4 app is pretty good and now appears to be very responsive either because it has improved (which is likely) or because I have more power behind it now too (although I’ve tried running on a Mac Mini too and never liked it). One of the big parts has been that my Wife has come along for the journey this time… by which I mean she has done pretty much all the work in fixing all the non auto-matched content.
I’ve even signed up to Plex Pass which means extra content (like trailers) automatically there and most importantly that all new unwatched content is also synced across as it appears using magic. Even watching old content is easy, tell it to sync, mark it unwatched and away it goes syncing the defined number of episodes and deleting the watched ones at it goes. I can also just walk to any TV in the house and pick up where I left off without having to work out what I’ve already watched… loving it.
It’s this centralised library function which has always had me interested, but the way it all worked before just never clicked for me until now.
So I probably need to grab one more ATV (probably a new 4K one ) for the lounge room replace the Mac Mini that used to live there (and before anyone asks, that machine has been migrated to Server duties for Caching and Time Machine).
Speaking of ATV and my new setup, the ATV remote is a necessary evil. It’s both excellent and terrible at the same time. While I can use my Logitech Harmony report to control everything, that swipy remote really is better for interacting with the TV (It’s also very nice that the functionality is also now built into iOS11). Sadly that means two remotes rather than just one, although once the TV and receiver are on I tend to only use the ATV so I can just use the little one since it can control the volume of the receiver too.