To be fair, I’ve worked in mainframe operations, IT, and software development over the past couple decades. So it’s not overwhelming. However, it is quite impressive! I’m completely envious of your setup. If only I could justify that cost to my wife!! I might use your setup as an example of what it could cost to help justify my budget…. LOL
BTW. I have used DD-WRT on and off for years. I’ll have to read up on pfSense before my next router project.
Thank you for all your help and taking the time to document/share your setup. I know who to reach out to when I’m looking for advice from an enthusiast.
I also worked in a big data / big compute (emphasis on compute) environment as well. Compared to that, what I have is “workstation/at my desk” grade. If you think of me as an “enthusiast” then I have one thing to say –
I’m retired. This is what I do for “S’s & G’s” to keep myself busy
DD-WRT is nice for the enthusiast but it doesn’t offer stateful firewall services the resources in a router can. That’s why I went with a solution which can give me what I’m accustomed to working with at the non-enterprise price point less those few things only found in enterprise solutions. (e.g. I don’t need 100 Gb connections crossing the country nor do I have the routing requirements)
As for justifying the budget and WAF (Wife Approval Factor), there is an easy answer;
“Wife? What wife?”
This solution was designed to provide:
As maintenance free as possible
Meet the needs I have now and expected growth for the next 5 years.
Sufficient growth, given current trends to last up to 10 years. (when 10 GbE is mainstream in the home and 1 GbE is obsolete )
After that point I doubt I’ll care bout computers that much anymore as long as my streaming and other interactive services work.
dear lord! That’s awesome!!! I wanna hang at your place… LOL!!
Seriously… I have a QNAP TS-453Be and I feel more and more like I underbought (even after using the original spreadsheet you had on google docs to balance price point and features). Transcoding works… but definitely struggles with more than one item at a time… I find myself doing transcoding and optimizing video ahead of time for viewing so the QNAP doesn’t have to do it (via Don Melton’s scripts) . For storage I have no real complaints… but I think I’m going to have to look at a NUC and separating storage from compute (as you have suggested) if I really want to leverage Plex.
@ChuckPa Hello, so, im sorry if this has been asked, I have tried to read all the document and didn’t get to the correct answer.
I have tried Synology 220+ and 620slim, and neither of them worked for what I was trying to do.
Playing a 4k HEVC 10bit movie with HDR and adding SRT subtitles as of course, it was transcoding. Both went to cpu max and could never play the file. Maybe for a couple of seconds, but then buffering again. Of course CPU was at 100% all the time. So my question is, which NAS is it the one that can do that? Im mostly watching ~60GB 4k HDR movies with subtitles, mostly SRT but I would like also to be able to add PGS. All this was played thru my gigabit private network ,with unifi setup and the player is the PLEX APP on LG OLED C9 65 4k HDR tv. Thanks a lot!
If you are watching 4K content on a 4K television – there should be NO video transcoding.
Adding SRT subtitles is usually ok with televisions because they can accept text subtitle overlays (how closed captioning works). You must be careful to set the app for “Automatic” subtitle burning. If forced/always then CPU resource is used unnecessarily.
Televisions almost never accept Image-based subtitles (PGS, VOBSUB, or DVDRIP) because these are overlayed by the BluRay player in special hardware before sending to the TV.
If you want to use PGS (or any other image based subtitles), NAS solutions will almost always mandate you burn-in the subtitles in advance before placing the media into the Library. Once Image-based subtitles are burned-in as part of the image, the Intel hardware can easily transcode the composite video.
With the current trends in the market, the majority of products won’t be able to do that task. Nothing in the Synology product line have sufficient CPU power to burn subtitles (CPU resource). Only the upper end QNAP i5 & i7 systems can.
An alternative architecture, which is becoming more popular, is to separate the Compute resource from the Storage resource.
I have also taken that step. I use an Intel NUC to run the server which draws media from the NAS. This allows me to grow either resource independent of the other. I let the NAS be a NAS (storing and serving up files). The NUC does what it does best – compute.
Therefore, my recommendations:
Carefully curate your media before adding to Plex & select any of the J4xxx CPU offerings from the popular vendors
-or-
Separate compute from storage,
a. Choose a NAS which offers you storage growth for the next several years (changing chassis to get more slots is MUCH more expensive than getting extra to start so plan well ahead)
b. Size a compute resource, such as a NUC, which you can sit on top of the NAS and provide the computational resource.
@ChuckPa
Thanks for you answer.
Yeah, I would expect the same, but somehow, for some 4k content, the device does transcoding, even without subtitles.
My question is if there is a NAS with enough cpu power to handle 1 stream of transcoding. Lets say budget is not an issue.
Also, having a NUC + a NAS, is the same as having my pcmasterrace turned on the 24 hours, which would do the job.
What about the QNAP TVS-h1288x. Do you know how the performance is?
@ChuckPa thanks for posting the chart! Google are taking their time about getting it back up…
May I ask…are there any plans to support AMD embedded transcoding? I went and bought a Qnap TVS-673e thinking it would work
Lastly, I know the NAS can support an Nvidia GPU…why doesn’t this NAS have Nvidia in the external GPU support? Is it the case that even buying a GPU wouldn’t get more hardware transcoding support?
what is the best value for money (with Plex Pass, supporting hardware transcoding) 5 bay NAS at the moment (qnap/synology)? Running Plex as an app or docker on the box.
I know Engineering wants to add AMD support (heck, we all do).
I don’t know where / what is happening with that effort as I’ve been rather deep in Synology of recent.
@tom80H thanks but it is some how ridiculous that Plex is relying on a Google Docs document, which is blocked for months now, and not able to provide a fall where you can filter and select on things. Thanks for the screenshots …
dear lord! That’s awesome!!! I wanna hang at your place… LOL!!
