I've been seriously wanting to buy a Synology NAS and use Plex to transcode media throughout my house, but it's just not a good marriage. I'll probably end up building an unRAID server instead. Am I crazy?
Not totally true mate, Synology NAS are very good indeed, you just need to get an Intel based box as these are better, can have their ram upgraded and do a better job in transcoding.
I currently run a low end ARM one and it doesnt transcode, yet plays content fantastically with the clients.
I know this is a 5 year old thread but the subject is relevant.
I’m just getting started with PMS on my synology 918+, which of course was not available to the op… but I thought my results so far would be of interest.
I have two roku ultra players
I originally intended to use synology “video station” along with the roku app “ds video” and that works reasonably well but since support for it is going away in 2019 I went searching for a different solution. I tried hard to stick with simple, oob synology solutions but they are just not there. the synology media server isn’t very mature (just my opinion) and won’t transcode mpeg 2 to H264 at all, so I am finding myself back with plex.
So far I like plex. I don’t have the plex pass and it happily transcodes ripped DVDs native mpeg2 to h264 for the roku. it burns about 30 to 50% cpu because I’m not using hardware transcoding. if I get around to transcoding rips with handbrake then they will play natively
So I’m liking this combo. hardware transcoding will be the next upgrade and that will support anything you throw at it except the heaviest 4k uhd.
So the 918+ is great. I wouldn’t spend a fortune just to transcode 4k uhd on the fly. offline transcode that content yourself. it’s just that the 918+ horsepower is really good and you don’t even need hardware transcoding for DVDs (one stream)
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