Looking for a little advice, but first some background. I’ve always run my PMS on an always on Mac desktop. For years this was an iMac but I recently bought a Mac Studio w/ M1 Max. My media was always stored on a Drobo 5C which was direct attached to the Mac. Then Drobo announced they are not supporting the latest version of MacOS and thus I migrated all my media over to a Synology DS1520. In watching Plex in this setup, I’ve noticed that most my movies (blu-ray rips in MKV container) are being transcoded (where as previously they were direct played) on an AppleTV 4K which is my main media consumption device. This causes noticeable delay when starting a movie and lag when FF or Rewinding.
So my question is this: would I be better off moving the PMS over to run direct on the DS1520? Would that enable direct play again vs transcoding? Would this improve performance to co-locate the media and PMS? I have plenty of headroom on the Mac Studio to transcode, I just would prefer less lag/delay when starting a movie or using transport controls. Or is this a problem with my current combo (Mac Studio and DS1520) not playing nice with AppleTV? Should I look to get a Shield instead? I guess I’m not 100% sure if the transcoding is caused by the media being on a NAS now (as opposed to DAS) or if I’d be better off moving the PMS or replacing the player? Or just shut up and live with it lol
I’ve long been an advocate of using PC/Mac as a Plex Server over NAS devices. As long as everything is wired, any delay is negligible. And the new M1-native PMS server runs great and takes advantage of the processor in the studio.
I would agree the Studio M1 Max performance is amazing, maybe a dozen 4K HDR transcodes at once using 20% CPU, and the power draw isn’t too bad, around 50W.
The DS1520+ has an x64 (Celeron J4125) 2.0 Ghz CPU according to Plex’s NAS Compatibility list, and it would make a fine server that can do a couple of transcodes in HW. I would be happy to own one.
We should investigate and understand why you’re seeing transcoding rather than direct play to the apple tv.
I don’t own a Synology NAS. Could it be spinning the drives down?
How large is your library? 100,000 videos?
How is your network connected? Everything wired?
Have you ever emptied trash, cleaned bundles, and optimized the database?
What exact version of PMS are you running?
You can always install a test PMS on the syno, and point it to a limited share with like 10 films. I would take care not to mess things up this close to the holidays. We should be able to make your Studio sing.
