Nice, should be a nice upgrade! Been debating getting the V for av1 support, but I’m also just holding off hoping Apple TV will support it soon.

Do you experience buffering if you watch on a pc / laptop on VLC via network? This will tell you if it’s network speed related or hardware power related. I would assume the pi is not quite powerful enough. I am using a device called a Vero 4k+ and it works wonderfully. But my network setup sounds similar to yours, I just have an smb share on my pc and I added it as a source in kodi.

There is an iOS app I discovered yesterday called ProxMate, and it seems pretty nice!