Synology upgrade question (DS416play to DS418play)

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Hey all,

I currently have a DS416play with two 8tb WD Red drives in it, and - after some tips from ChuckPA - it’s been running great for the last year.

The idea was to encode my movies as X265, and that’s been going well. But - as the DS416play can only transcode 8-bit X265, and none of my devices yet support 10-bit X265 - I’ve been sticking to 8-bit encoding. With this, I notice colour banding in movies which I think is related to the 8-bit-ness?

At some point this year, I hope to upgrade to a 4K TV which DOES support 10-bit - so will want to be using 10-bit encodes for that. Though I’ll still be using some player devices that don’t support that.

I understand that the DS418play supports transcoding of 10-bit files. So I was thinking about upgrading to that.

So, a few quick questions:

  • Would Plex on the DS418play hardware transcode 1080p 10-bit X265 files down to something older players can deal with (say, 8-bit X265 or X264)?
  • If I started having 4k movies in 10-bit X265, would Plex on the DS418play be able to hardware transcode THOSE down to 1080p 8-bit X265 or X264 for older screens / devices?
  • Does anyone have any inside knowledge on upcoming Synology NASes? I bought my DS416play just days before the DS418play was released at a very similar price. I kinda don’t want to make that mistake again! If there’s another upgraded DiskStation coming out soon, I’d rather wait.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Phil.

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Thanks for the advice! I think you might be right about the DS918+ - I don’t want to rush into getting the not-quite-powerful-enough NAS again. The QNAP range looks a bit beyond me - and I think it would be near impossible to transfer my current drives across (whereas it looks pretty straight forward to move drives between devices running the same version of DSM.)

I’m going to hold out till Black Friday and see if I can get a deal on a 918+ (unlikely, I know!) It’s a lot of money, but looking at ebay it seems like Synology stuff holds its value well - so I might be able to make a few hundred pounds back selling my old DS416play.

Thanks again!

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Monkeyhat,

I have a Syno and a QNAP.
Because the partition layouts are different, there isn’t any direct cross-compatibility at the drive level.
I had to copy the entire contents across the LAN once the QNAP was setup.

From an operation level, the QNAP is more like Windows because of what it exposes for you to access in the UI. Synology is more MacOS like.

Regarding horsepower, you have a nice wide range of CPUs in QNAP ranging from the same J3455 found in the DS918+ (found in the TS-453Be) to the honking i7-7700 CPU found in models like mine (TVS-1282T)

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