I returned my HDHR duo and bought a new HDHomeRun extend (HDTC-2US) and installed it on a wired ethernet network in my home. Even though the new HDHomeRun extend has built in hardware transcoding to h.264, the PLEX Transcoder pegs out the CPU in the 90% range on my Synology DS418play and freezes playback continuously. Still unusable as a Live TV and DVR tuner on PLEX running on Synology NAS. I know it is partially due to the chipset of the DS418play, but suspect that PLEX has an opportunity to tune their transcoder when consuming an OTA h.264 stream.
Maybe they can talk to the Synology Surveillance Station team because I can live stream (and record) #6 camera feeds simultaneously at 720p from my DS418play and the CPU on my DS418play doesn’t go above 20%.
I configured my Live TV and DVR to a Win10 PC with an i7 3.4Ghz CPU running PLEX and the Plex Transcoder barely shows up on task manager. But I would really like to run my DVR and Live TV from my Synology DS418play.
BTW: I do appreciate the capability to add UNC folders to my PLEX libraries on my PC so that DVR’ed content can be stored directly on my NAS drives from my PC Plex Server and made available for playback along with all the rest of my TV Shows and Movies. This feature is the only saving grace to not being able to use my HDHR directly through my NAS server.
The NAS while nice is still a fairly limited processor. It doesnt show in the NAS Compatibility list and you can see that most of those on the list struggle with transcoding which is a requirement of the DVR. it is not surprising to me the desktop does so much better. I have both a connect and extend. The encoding of the extend in essence makes it easier on your player and relieves some of the load from the server but all live tv goes through the transcode process.
Thank you for your feedback. It got me looking at all of the settings on my HDHR and my NAS PLEX server in more detail…
Luckily because of where I live I have become accustomed to functional solutions and don’t have a requirement for 4K solutions. I am satisfied with DVD quality 720p… ecstatic to get 1080p… and would live with 540p if I couldn’t get anything better. The settings below put my NAS CPU in the ~50% range while transcoding 1 stream. Anything higher pegs the CPU and causes the stream to buffer.
I think I am going to leave it this way to watch Live TV using my NAS server, but all recording will still be done using my Win10 i7 PC. When I attempted a second parallel stream from the NAS server it pegged the NAS CPU and caused both streams to buffer and freeze.
Here is a configuration that gives me a clear picture without any buffering: (playback tested on PC, appleTV4, and iPhone)
