[Cincinnatus]

I've been having some trouble getting Kodi on my Shield to create DBs on my NAS, and have been wondering if the hassle is worth it, when there are other methods for DB management and sychronization. My NAS has apps for Kodi, Emby and Plex, so those are options in my case. Because of its power, I plan to use the Shield as the 'head end' to my TV, and access files on the NAS.

I'd appreciate hearing some discussion on the pros/cons of these sharing methods:
Kodi on NAS, UPnP to Kodi client(s)
Plex on NAS, Kodi client(s)
Emby on NAS, Kodi client(s)
MySQL on NAS, Kodi client(s)

What I'm getting at is, with all the hassles of trying to get mySQL working with my client, is it not easier to achieve the same thing with something that doesn't require a lot of head-banging and custom config files?

I'm sure I'll take some heat for asking this question, but if the replies bias toward using Plex or Emby on the 'back end' for DB management, then why not use them natively across the board on the clients, too?

[SandmanCL]

Just curious, when you say "My NAS has apps for Kodi[...]", what do you mean, exactly ? And which NAS is this ?

personally I have three different Android Kodi clients sharing a library stored in MySQL on a Linux server. It's not for everyone, but works for me. I followed instructions found through forums here, but if you need guidance on that setup I can probably provide some bare-minimum instructions.

[Cincinnatus]

I'm running a QNAP TS451 which supports apps run directly on the NAS. If you click on the link in my first post, I've outlined the problem I'm having, but I'm coming to the conclusion that this is far more complicated than it needs to be.

So far, I still don't understand the answer to this question:
What does manually configuring Kodi via MySQL get us that using the native UPnP library sharing does not?