Hello all,
I am looking for some advice on which path to take. I am looking for a solution that will allow me to stream videos to 3-4 TV sets in my house, and to devices like a PC or iPads/iPhones. It could be streaming two different movies to different TVs/iPads at the same time. Ideally, I would like also to be able to stream music to different players (Chromcast Audio maybe?).
I have a whole bunch of familiy videos in AVI (13 GB per hour) captured from an older mini DV camera, a whole bunch of M2TS clips from a sony video camera, as well as a whole bunch of movies in mp4/mkv/avi formats. I don’t minds re-encoding the movies offline if necessary. Presently I have a D-Link DNS-434 NAS on which I am storing all the movies and pics and music that I have.
I am considering buying a rack mountable server with a good xeon in it, on which to install Linux and make it my PLEX server and connect it to the DNS-343 NAS that I have, and hide everything in a corner in my basement. And doing some reading on this site I see that some people mention the possibility to install and run PLEX directly from a Synology NAS.
I would greatly appreciate any advice you guys could offer on which way would be the better option. I am looking for a solution that is elegant and that works well all the time, not just another gadget or an experiment.
Thanks in advance.
-Claude
Depending on the clients, and versions of synology you may encounter issues if transcoding of media is required by the clients i suggest you check out this article
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200375666-Plex-Media-Server-Requirements
I’m not a fan of running PMS directly on an off-the-shelf consumer NAS appliance. The CPUs are too pathetic and part of the featureset and flexibility of Plex leans on PMS being able to transcode. Either split PMS onto its own server separate from the NAS, or build your own NAS with enough power to perform both jobs.
Rackmounting is the opposite of power efficiency, noise, and cost. It’s for datacenters where density and the ability to access and manage dozens or hundreds of servers is an issue, and those things trump noise and power. For the home user, while it looks cool, it rarely makes sense. Even when I move my servers to my basement, I don’t see myself rackmounting, and this is from an IT pro who has built some nice racks… for businesses. Save your money (both on the initial hardware and the ongoing electricity cost) and just get (or build) a quality server tower.
See my sig for an example build of an all-in-one PMS-NAS that is quiet and power-efficient.
Thanks for the feedback sremick. I was thinking of a short rack because I would also like to have a 48 port switch in it and probably some room for all the ugly hardware from router to NAS. I am building a new house and thinking of hardwiring ethernet to the rooms and TVs and other devices like TVs, gaming consoles, AV reciever, some cable recievers, maybe a wireless access point somewhere, etc while leaving wifi for our laptops and prtable devices as much as I can. I am probably overdoing it. I know racks and rackmounted servers are more suited for businesses but my concern is not doing enough and then regretting it… I am very comfortable with the hardware being an IT pro myself as well. My only concern is having an efficient solution that is easy to use by the rest of the family with knowing anything about the ugly hardware behind it.
I will look closely at your signature and see if I can have something similar.
Thanks again.
-Claude
I’ve used PMS within my QNAP TS-653 Pro NAS, and have been just beyond happy with it “working”. I have 3 Roku’s running Plex clients, 2 Xbox plex clients, and 5 iphone/ipad clients running plex. It’s works 100%, and just last week I added 4 camera DVR recording, and so far no loss on performance.
Just an FYI. As long as you don’t ‘go cheap’ with the NAS, many of the new NAS units have i5/i7 Intel chispets with lots of memory.
