Hey everyone, after doing a lot of searching and reading I’ve come to the forums to seek advice. I purchased a DS418play recently and I’m blown away with how awesome a home server is. But I’m experiencing some small hiccups along the way.
I’m having buffering issues with the DS418play while casting to both my chromecast devices with 1080p .mkv files - media info here.
Chromecast 1: It could not handle the 1080p video at all, I had to change playback settings to 720p 2mbps Chromecast 2: It did a better job, I switched it to my 5ghz network connection which the pinned chromecast thread says not to do but seemed to help in my case. However, still suffered from buffering issues on occasion particularly at the start of a new episode and had trouble gaining steam. I did manage to get through one episode with almost not issues on the Chromecast 2.
Specs:
Using Plex Version 1.13.0.5023
I do not have Plex Pass currently and I am using my iPhone 7 with the Plex app as a remote to stream the content to the chromecast.
It appears a lower playback quality is the one thing helping me out here but that’s all I could confirm. As a total noob to owning a NAS, I wasn’t exactly sure how to troubleshoot if the DS418play is not powerful enough for trans-coding my files or if it has something to do with my network. I don’t really plan on streaming 4k, 1080p is my maximum and it would be great to have a worryless solution. I’ve been looking at the DS918+ as an alternative since I’m still within my return window of the play. But I want to be sure that it’s not the NAS before I make the switch.
Sorry, I don’t have edit access yet but I should note that I am not casting to both of them at the same time! I’m casting to one or the other at separate times. If they are both running at the same time it’s usually Netflix on one and Plex on the other
Continued to do some more testing after a lot more googling. Really not sure how to troubleshoot these things yet, would be awesome if anyone had some resources for this type of troubleshooting. Overall, it looks like it’s related mostly to transcoding in my situation I think? Would love to get some further opinions. The Synology CPU usage ramps up to about 100% as soon as I start casting one of those 1080p .mkv files which needs to be transcoded. Direct playing something uses almost nothing and I experience no buffer issues on either of the Chromecasts with a 1080p .mp4 H264 file, the difference is night and day. I currently don’t a have Plex Pass to take advantage of hardware accelerated streaming so I can’t test and see if that makes any difference.
Speed tests on my iphone beside each Chromecast showed me that I get upwards of 700mbps next to the Chromecast 2 and 400 for the Chromecast 1. Seems safe to rule out the network?
Now lets say for those that are not keen on converting their media files, is this something that the DS918+ would solve or is that wishful thinking. Am I just expecting too much out of too little with the DS418play and possibly no Plex Pass?
@trumpy81 thank you for your detailed reply, this is excellent . I can confirm now that after using Adobe Media encoder to convert all of those .mkv’s to a H264 .mp4 format, the issue was resolved. But it took a really long time for 24 2gb files to convert, a lot longer than I would have liked (12 hours or so). Next is to try out Plex Pass + hardware acceleration and see how that performs.
It’s comforting to know that the DS418play can handle 1080p without having to transcode. Also, thank you for sharing the information about passmark scores with me, learn something new everyday. I can now see that the DS918+ processor is in the 2000+ range so it theoretically should handle transcoding based on your comments. I may still consider the switch. The difference in price I would have to add for the switch is approximately $230 CAD which leaves me to wonder if that price difference is worth the performance increase. I last night learned that link aggregation on the play is of no benefit to me since my router does not support it
Odroid C2 seems like a cool toy to play around with. Do you know if you can use the iPhone 7 as a remote with the Plex app to play media on the Odroid C2?
The DS418play has been fantastic, and for a household of two I’ve had no issues streaming two 1080p streams. I’ve learned a lot about Plex and using a pre-built NAS as a media server since creating this thread. In the end, I just made sure that my media is in a supported format for the Chromecast so I can direct play without any transcoding necessary. Handbrake has been extremely useful in converting my media, better than adobe media encoder. Media encoder seemed to have problems with converting certain audio formats and Handrabke had no issues. I also really enjoy the auto shut off feature after the job is complete.
I was also able to get my hands on a Nvidia Shield for cheap and that solved pretty much all my problems since it supports so many media types. Happy with the end result.
