I was wondering if I could get some advice from existing Synology owners here. I’m currently running Plex from my MacBook but for various reasons want to move it to a NAS which runs 24/7. My media is mostly Blu Ray and 4K rips which can be played by both my TVs either Direct Play or Direct Stream, but sometimes the audio needs transcoding (latest Samsung TVs don’t support DTS audio, it transcodes to AAC).
I’m not too bothered about a RAID setup, so since I don’t need to transcode video would a DS118 be sufficient? Or is the 1GB RAM too limiting on Plex even without transcoding? I would have some other processes running like the download manager and maybe a Git server. The other option I was looking at was the DS218+ for the Intel CPU and extra RAM, but obviously it comes at a much higher cost.
Are there any DS118 owners here who have tried Plex and wished they’d gotten a slightly beefier model? Or even any DS218+ owners who aren’t happy with how well Plex performs? Any advice offered will be much appreciated!
Thanks for the advice, although I was hoping to hear from some DS118 owners. I can live without RAID and transcoding. I was really wanting to know whether the fixed 1GB RAM is going to hamper Plex too badly.
I think I’ll buy a DS118, give it a proper testing as far as Plex is concerned and post the results here in case they’re useful to others.
I‘ve tested 4k Movies, with dts hd 5.1 and 7.1 audio, the cpu was around 10-30%. So no big deal for the ds118 to transcode audio.
Do have in mind that it is still in beta.
So I got Plex (beta) running on the DS118 and it seems to work just fine. Building the library took far longer than it should have done, and browsing the library on Plex clients is a bit slower than when it was running it on the MacBook, but that might be because now the index is on an HDD rather than an SSD.
But I can’t complain about the playback. I just tried 3 streams. One is 4K UHD Direct Play, one is 1080p Direct Play, and the last is 1080p with Direct Stream for the video, and the audio transcoded from DTS to AAC (since Samsung removed support for DTS on their newer TVs). The DS118 handled it all perfectly. Nowhere near the RAM limit which was my main worry before buying. The CPU rarely goes over 25%, but that’s just because of the audio transcoding. When using Direct Play only there’s hardly any CPU usage at all, which is what you’d expect. Let me know if you want me to try anything else.
One comment I would make about the Synology (unrelated to Plex), is if you’re looking to use the NAS to back up your Plex library, be warned that Synology’s Hyper Backup software is absolutely appalling. Lots of complaints about it over on the Synology forums. The initial backup to a USB drive (connected directly to the USB 3.0 port on the NAS) copied at a shocking 6MB/s, ran for days, and then failed at the finish. I ended up connecting the USB drive to the MacBook instead and using FreeFileSync to backup over the network.
I’m currently looking for an inexpensive NAS Plex solution and have been considering the Synology DS118 (among others). From what I can gather it has basically the same hardware as the DS218play, which the Synology website claims will do “real-time transcoding of 4K Ultra HD source content”. I figure they don’t advertise that fact for the DS118 because they want to position it as an entry level model only…
Anyway, would you be willing to test transcoding video, audio and subtitles all together? My library doesn’t include anything above 1080p, mostly h264 or x264 video and AC3 or DTS 6 channel audio. Ideally I would like to stream to Raspberry Pi 3, PC (should both be direct, no transcode), PS4, XBOX One, iPad and iPhone (unsure of supported formats on these).
Unfortunately the DS118 isn’t powerful enough for 1080p transcoding (from a Blu Ray source, i.e. burning in subtitles). I know this because I came across a bug in the Plex app for Samsung TVs which was causing videos to be transcoded unnecessarily. I had to convert some DTS audio tracks to AAC to prevent it happening, otherwise the playback would constantly buffer. Now that everything in my library can be direct played by both my TVs, I’ve had no problems with Plex for the past few months.
The 4K transcoding which Synology refers to is only available using their DS Video application. The Plex app cannot access the same hardware to do this (apparently Synology doesn’t make it accessible in their API). I did try the DS Video app on a Samsung TV just out of curiosity, but it has other playback problems and generally isn’t as good as Plex.
Also, something people rarely mention is although the Intel models like the DS218+ support hardware transcoding, the quality isn’t the best. If you care about quality then you’re better off transcoding ‘offline’ and storing multiple versions of the files in Plex. Then the smaller files can be used for syncing to iPads etc…
Ah that’s disappointing. Very useful info though, thanks for replying. It may be idealistic, but I’m hoping to find a budget solution where I can transcode on the fly and still get great quality! For now I will install Plex on my laptop (i7 with 8GB RAM) and see how it performs in transcoding for all those devices I mentioned above. If a “proper” computer can’t do it then I will have to adjust my expectations for a NAS solution Perhaps I’ll find a happy medium.
I’m not sure, but browsing the library is fine now that all the metadata has been built. The bit which took ages was the initial scan of the media and building/downloading the metadata, but that’s a one-off task.
Perhaps I’ll find a happy medium.