Hello:
I’ve been running Plex on Synology devices for several years… the DS211j and then the DS214play. I’m considering moving to the DS415+ for 2 reasons:
- I’m running out of disk space and either need to add an external enclosure to my 214, or replace it with a larger unit
- The 214 cannot transcode on the fly in a satisfactory manner.
There seems to be quite a few people hunting around for the best value-priced NAS from all sorts of different vendors, on which to run Plex.
I favor running Plex on a commercial NAS rather than a home-built box for several reasons:
- I like the RAID implementation on commercial NAS devices. Hot swap is quick and easy when a drive fails, unlike most tower PC environments
- Power consumption is very low. Something around 10 watts idle and 30-40 watts at peak use.
- Small footprint. It sits in a corner of my office and offers no trouble. There’s no display on it to use up space. It’s easily administered via web portal.
However, very few NAS devices offer the CPU resources to transcode on the fly. Seems even the DS415+ and DS1515+ are hit and miss for doing 1080p transcoding, and you’re looking at $800 investment to get into the DS1515+.
Part of me is considering buying the afore-mentioned DS415+.
Another part of me is considering buying an Intel NUC, though. An i5 powered micro-PC. Load it with Linux, put PMS on it, mount my media volumes from my NAS via NFS, and I’m off and running with a higher-powered transcoder while still protecting my files with RAID on the NAS. Problem with that is the MySQL database is on my NAS, not the NUC. And I have other apps on my NAS that make use of MySQL, so now I have to run 2 MySQL engines and one of them is accessing the database over NFS, which seems hinky to me (I’m a DBA and DBDev, but work predominantly with MS SQL).
But it seems to me that a 3rd option is also possible, that the Plex community would really appreciate. A divergence between the database/media server, and the transcoding server. Similar to Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Citrix Presentation Server or Nvidia’s GeForce Now technology.
A simple config file in the Plex Media Server lists IP’s or hostnames that are available for transcoding tasks. A companion listener app resides on those target hosts. Rather than the PMS running the transcoder locally, it pushes the original file to the target host and the target host then runs the transcoder and feeds the output back to the PMS, who then feeds the content back to the requesting client in a neatly transcoded format. Obviously this needs excellent network throughput, but wired gigabit would be sufficient for most applications and it becomes an infrastructure problem rather than a product feature problem.
This then also allows for multiple transcoding servers, that can even be load-balanced by simple cpu utilization queries and logged over a short time window. The PMS keeps track of which transcoder is least busy and sends transcode jobs to that computer. This makes PMS highly scalable and divorces storage resources and main database from the transcoding duties.
Upgrading transcoders then becomes a matter of installing the Plex transcoder server software (PTS) onto the new hardware, configuring the PMS to know about the new host and remove the old host from the config. No downtime for PMS, no loading onto a new PMS host or NAS.
