[jweaks]

I am reworking my home setup. I am keeping my Win7 Kodi box which works great and it will be my server. I am adding at least one FireTV Kodi box and probably a Zotac box running Win8. At some point soon I will also probably add a large USB-3 drive via my router (Asus RT-AC68).

Should I go with SMB or UPnP, or other way? I am not sure that it will matter much?

[DaVu]

Using the USB could be a bottleneck for streaming...even more when multiple clients trying to stream at the same time. So i wouldnt recommend to stream this way. I might be wrong, but I can remember talking about this on IRC channel and it was said.

Have you ever thought about a NAS? They arent that empensive anymore and will give you more features than a connected USB drive.

You can also plug a large drive in one of your windows boxes and share those folders to other clients.

And for answering your question...i would prefere SMB because UPnP dont support subtitle iirc

[jweaks]

That makes perfect sense. Don't know why I didn't think of that. I can get the 66 model router without USB3 to save a few bucks and put that into a NAS. Thanks.

That being said I still have to choose which protocol to use to share the media with the clients. A NAS box would allow me to do NFS which I think may have an advantage connecting with the FireTV.

[DaVu]

Yes...might be. But iirc, and that might depend in the NAS you buy, you can share with nfs and SMB. So the windows clients can use smb and the fire tv can use nfs.

In my case I use an unraid server and I can share both with it