Hi ,
I am planning to buy a NAS server to play my media in my Samsung TV mostly thru Plex Media Server. I have my media in external hard drives attached to my old laptop at the moment and works perfectly fine including subtitles. I can use Plex at home, or remotely.
However, two problems.
1 - I don’t want the laptop to be ON all the time.
2- As I have couple of hard drives it looks quite messy.
So I thought I should go for NAS. I was checking and I quite like the Synology DS218J design plus the price was ok. But then when I started to do some research about it, I found out that this version doesn’t do transcoding at all (which I have no idea what it means and if I actually need it). I don’t want to buy something that wouldn’t work so if anyone help me, I would be really appreciated. 
So the questions are:
1- Can I play my media (movies) on Synology DS218J without a problem including subtitles?
2- As everything works at the moment perfectly, how can I know if my media is actually transcoding when I play it thru my PC using Plex and watching on my Samsung TV?
3-If above is not possible and I need to choose another NAS server, what would you recommend similar budget like Synology DS218J (about £160)
4-if you cant give me a brand name or etc, what would be the min specs I should look for? CPU, RAM etc.
Thank you very much everyone…
