I am currently running Plex server on my Nvidia Shield with fairly good results. My use is fairly simple: Playing all my ripped Blurays/DVD’s between the Living Room TV (Wife) and the upstairs TV(Roku) or my computer for myself.
I have a HDhomerun Extend which is being used by Plex for my live tv and recordings.
Currently I am storing all the movies and videos on an ancient/creaking 1st gen WD mycloud 2Tb (single bay) Nas.
Since I have lousy Dsl (I call it “Crawlband”) service I have NO illusion of using the Plex/ShieldTV for sending movies/recording outside the home. At 384Kb upload speeds, well, it would be unwatchable.
While the system is working well as it is for local viewing, I am looking to buy a NAS to replace the old MyCloud (It is starting to act a bit flaky) as the Plex Server and use the Nvidia Shield as a client device.
I used Handbrake to convert the ripped Mkv Bluray files to H.264 in order to get the file size down from 25-30 gigs to about 3 - 5 gigs each.
Since I have used the H.264 codec on the files, should I even worry about the “hardware encoding” options on higher end Nas’s? IE: While I was looking at the Synology DS218+ as my next Nas, I am wondering if I am buying more Nas than I need.
Cheap? Maybe. But I can’t see spending extra money for a feature I might not use. Or for that matter, need.
Thanks for reading this long winded post and any advice I can get.
Sorry for the novel…
I have owned both a Synology 916+ and a 918+ for the sol purpose of using it as a Plex media server, and have had a great experience with them. I also structure most of my media the same way as you, ripping the Blu-Ray and then using Handbrake to reduce the file size (though the compression I use is not quite as extreme as you) and have it in a .m4v container.
One benefit of structuring your media this way is so you can Direct Play everything. Just about every device on the market can natively play H.264 .m4v files, and more and more now support HEVC (H.265)
Because you have your media in a really good position for Direct Play, you are correct in not needing much power for transcoding. But I will say… Hardware Transcoding is pretty awesome when you need it.
You should be fine with the DS218+, or even the DS218play. For your use-case the only reason I would suggest looking into the 718+ or 918+ would be for storage increase over time. Not sure what your plans are for hard drives, but if you run out of space, you will have to replace BOTH drives in order to see a capacity increase. The 718+ and 918+ can expand to 7 and 9 hard drives (respectively) with the addition of the DX517. And if you start with the 918+ and only put 2 drives in, you can just add another drive when you need more space (depending on what RAID configuration you choose).
So I’m not recommending you the 718+ or 918+ for performance, but for capacity expansion. Again, don’t know what your plans are for drives (for all I know you might be looking at two 12TB’s in RAID 1), but look 5 years down the road and think about how big your storage needs might be.
TLDR: I think you will be fine with either the DS218+ or DS218play. Both are 64bit processors, and can do hardware transcoding. Upgrading drives just might be a hassle down the road.
If you are on a tight budget, considering you media should Direct Play easily, why not look into buying an external drive and plugging it into your Shield and ditch the MyCloud?
Hi Scott, Thanks for the detailed reply. I has not thought about adding an external drive to the Shield. I have a spare 1 TB usb3 hard drive that I will try on the Shield. Might be a consideration.
The thing is, when it’s just me and the wife, the Shield allows us to both watch what we want without issue. The thing is, once you try to do more than 2 things at once some “glitches” start popping up here and there. So when the kids/grandkids show up and multiple people start hitting the shield it’s starts to struggle a bit. That is one of the reasons I am looking to move the server duties from the Shield to something with a bit more oompf.
I was not aware of the add on units (DX517) Synology made. But considering the price, I think I would just go big (10+ TB drives) and have a bunch of room that should hold me for the next few years.
