Synology vs NUC?

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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I was running Plex on my Synology 918+ which does support hardware transcoding. To get more storage, I switched to an 1819+ before learning they no longer support hardware transcoding. Womp womp to me.

A buddy recommended I switch to hosting it on a dedicated NUC running Ubuntu - so I’ve just picked up a new i5 10th gen NUC, put memory and an SSD in it and before I start installing anything, I realized … I don’t know if it’ll support hardware transcoding either.

I typically have a couple of direct plays going on, and as many as 6 remote / off site transcoded plays going too (family in the UK and Germany are quite heavy users).

Am I well specced, or should I get a different NUC?

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Do you have room for both?

You can mount the one NAS to the other and let the DS918+ do the transcoding.

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It’s a NUC10FNK

I don’t get any transcoding when playing locally - but almost all my remote sessions are transcoded, almost certainly due to bandwidth / local client configurations.

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The 918+ got repurposed once the 1819+ was deployed, so I don’t have it for Plex any longer.

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Huh. That doesn’t sound like a lot - I’ve had more than that on the 1819+ and the goal of this project was to increase the capacity of my Plex server a bit.

I may need to rethink.

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what’s the full NUC spec please?

NUC10FNK doesn’t specify CPU. It should be NUC10IxFNK where x is the cpu.

It only tells us the case, board, and family.

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sorry. missed that

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Yep, it’s an i5. The supplied model number is the only one on the box, my bad.

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The ASIC in that beast will crank some serious video transcoding if required.

The i5 will handle 4-5 Dolby 7.1 -> stereo audio conversions simultaneously with crunching down the video.

If the NUC is the Plex server, and media storage is on the NAS at 1 GbE, it’s golden.
The internal SSD will be perfect for the PMS database and general OS operation.

Where it’ll get touchy is if/when subtitles are involved. 6482 passmarks will, depending on type, allow some subtitle burning but it will be YMMV.

Best case here is Text-based subtitles (SRT), which the player supports and overlays by itself.

In this case:

  1. UHD -> 720p
  2. 7.1 -> stereo
  3. SRT subtitles transmitted as the 3rd stream (player doing the rendering itself)

The NUC will cruise right along. I can see 4+ concurrent sessions out of that.

(I have a NUC8i7HVK here. I ran out of playback devices before I ran out of gas in the box)

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Thanks - thats reassuring. Like I said, I can have 4 or 5 or so remote transcodes going, along with one or two local direct playbacks. Goal is the NUC running PMS, the media sitting on the 1819+ (the 918+ is out of the picture now, unfortunately).

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From a network perspective, you’ll start running out of network at 10 concurrent DirectPlay streams of 80 Mbps each. (800 Mbps usage).

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Direct is rarely going to be an issue - 2 max. There’s only 3 of us in the house, and one of them is a Youtube obsessed 11yo

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