Ive been looking at buying a NAS and recently discovered its potential in respect of a PMS and wondered if any are actually capable of upto 4x simultaneious 1080p transcodes using hardware acceleration.
I was looking at the Synology 918+, but looking at its CPU (J34xx) Im not sure it would be up to the job. Reviews I have seen suggest this cpu could handle at best 2-3 streams with the newer J5005 managing 4.
Id recently seen a review stating that the 1019+ could do 9 transcodes, but Im a but doubtful of this and question the testing methods, given what I have learned about the capabilities of the electrons.
So might actually have to wait until some newer NAS models adopting the j5005 CPU or even look at a self build. Im happy to self build, but just thought a one box solution would just be a bit easier, and I also like the look of the other features that they can offer.
I am using QNAP. QNAP offers NAS products which allow you to select which processor you want. Several models allow selection of i3, i5, and i7 CPU. I opted for the i7 (i7-7700 KabyLake)
But that sorts of defeats the whole point really, esepcially as all of my media is 1080p to start with.
To add to Trumpy’s reply,
I am using QNAP. QNAP offers NAS products which allow you to select which processor you want. Several models allow selection of i3, i5, and i7 CPU. I opted for the i7 (i7-7700 KabyLake)
Looked at these too but way beyond budget.
I dont want to buy a device that doesn’t give me much headroom. Seems these latest NAS’s haven’t caught up with the newer CPUs yet, so I either wait a bit longer, or look to self build (which would be cheaper).
QNAP has many NAS with newer CPU capabilities (much more than Synology offers).
TVS-951X for example has the next generation Intel® Celeron® 3865U, which is an upgrade from the J3455.
Then you get into the bigger x72 family, x82 family, x77 w/GPU support, etc.
So there are ways to hit 4x1080p transcoding, but you are going to pay for it. Remember these aren’t just CPU’s but full systems.
Now there are things you can do to help make it easier to transcode (reduce resolution/bitrate/use supported codec/etc.) but doing 4 simultaneous transcodes isn’t trivial.
At the end of the day, that level of performance comes with a price tag. So you can either increase budget, adjust requirements downward (less transcodes/etc.), or WAIT for the eventual price of HW to decrease.
The risk with the last option is that as you wait for the price to come down, 4k will become more and more standard. Then you will want 4x 4k and likely be back where you are today.
Just gonna add my 2 cents here, for you and anyone in the future looking for this… Its probably well beyond your budget, but I have the TS-1685. It uses an Intel Xeon, I forget which model, but I went with the higher-end CPU offered in the 1685. Its capable of transcoding 2 streams of 4k, so it would be more than capable of doing 4 1080p streams.
I also second @MwC_Trexx. Performance like that is going to come at a cost. You could go with a lower-level CPU and have it create optimized versions of the files ahead of time, but at the cost of storage space.
I recently bought the DS918+. I’ve had 4 streams going at the same time with no problems - only one of which was transcoding though (no. 4).
To my dad’s LG OLED 130 miles away
To my Samsung 55" on my home LAN
To my daughters 32" Samsung on my home LAN
To my son’s iphone
I have to say it’s been running Plex flawlessly for 3 months now, I am very impressed. I don’t run 4k streams though (yet). It’s running the default 4 gb ram with 4 4 TB WD reds.
The NAS compatibility chart shows the AMD powered units without any hardware encoding, even though some seem to have decent GPUs embedded like the QNAP TS-473.
Any idea why Plex doesn’t support the AMD hardware encoding or decoding?
Edit: errr, I left out the “V” in the TVS-473 as MwC_Trexx pointed out a couple posts below.
TS-x73 families don’t have the embedded GPU, part of the reason for lower cost. The TVS-x73 family has the embedded AMD GPU’s.
You could install a supported low-end Nvidia GPU in your TS-x73 that is on QNAP’s compatibility list (as long as is bus powered… ie. GTX-1030, etc.) and you should be in business.
