since I am the proud owner of a Synology DS214play with an Evansport chipset, I would like to see full support for this architecture in future PMS releases. The Intel Evansport chipset is an chipset specially designed for media NAS and has hardware support for transcoding multiple 1080p streams at once. It's perfect for running PMS on it.
Support for the Intel Evansport chipset includes:
Basic support (Package is installable without modifications, implemented since v0.9.9.1)
Package Center Support (updatable via the official Package Center sources)
+1 for this. Since you released a new Windows Phone 8 App, I purchassed a PlexPass subscription for a year. I would now love to see the new architecture of Evansport supported by Plex in order to have efficient transcoding.
I doubt it will be added for transcoder support. plex runs off of ffmpeg and for them to support the 214play they would at a bare minimum have to essentially support two seperate coding branches of plex as the ffmpeg used in 214play would be different from standard ffmpeg. But the more likely scenario is that there is no (or little) code written for it currently and the plex team would have to do a LOT of nitty gritty coding to support the different architecture and then still run mutliple builds of plex.
I personally don't see the huge attraction to buying those NAS boxes anyways... They cost several hundred dollars more than a DIY build and on top of costing more, they have far less processing power and features. They are nice for small businesses that want a drop and go configuration... But for a home user, the amount of time you spend trying to get weird configs working with it would be better spent researching a DIY build.
A DS214play is 400 dollars for a 2 HDD config. An example build that is: 50 dollars cheaper, holds 4 more hard drives and has a processor capable of transcoding (although only 1 stream at a time) is:
[PCPartPicker part list](http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2mm5c) / [Price breakdown by merchant](http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2mm5c/by_merchant/) / [Benchmarks](http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2mm5c/benchmarks/)
CPU: [Intel Celeron G1610 2.6GHz Dual-Core Processor](http://pcpartpicker.com/part/intel-cpu-bx80637g1610) ($41.98 @ SuperBiiz) Motherboard: [Asus P8H77-I Mini ITX LGA1155 Motherboard](http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-p8h77i) ($102.98 @ SuperBiiz) Memory: [Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory](http://pcpartpicker.com/part/crucial-memory-ct2kit51264ba1339) ($59.99 @ Newegg) Case: [Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case](http://pcpartpicker.com/part/fractal-design-case-fdcanode304bl) ($89.99 @ NCIX US) Power Supply: [SeaSonic 360W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply](http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seasonic-power-supply-ssr360gp) ($59.99 @ Amazon) Total: $354.93 (Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.) (Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-12-18 14:44 EST-0500)
In this case, the MB I chose is discontinued I think but it is easy enough to use a different one.
I doubt it will be added for transcoder support. plex runs off of ffmpeg and for them to support the 214play they would at a bare minimum have to essentially support two seperate coding branches of plex as the ffmpeg used in 214play would be different from standard ffmpeg. But the more likely scenario is that there is no (or little) code written for it currently and the plex team would have to do a LOT of nitty gritty coding to support the different architecture and then still run mutliple builds of plex.
I read in another thread that Synology is currently readying the ffmpeg code for a public open-source release. They definitly agreed to make the code available. I think if this happens, and the patch is accepted and get incorporated into the main ffmpeg branch, support for the architectue in Plex could be possible without big problems for Plex itself.
I had been reading around a bit on this today and I wonder if it would be possible to swap out the ffmpeg libraries plex references with the evansport ffmpeg libraries as a sort of manual install. Due to ffmpeg's license the library should be seperate files buried in plex's install folder. Although I have no idea how well plex would handle those being swapped out as it may be a different command that has to be used for it to take advantage of it.
I personally don't see the huge attraction to buying those NAS boxes anyways... They cost several hundred dollars more than a DIY build and on top of costing more, they have far less processing power and features. They are nice for small businesses that want a drop and go configuration... But for a home user, the amount of time you spend trying to get weird configs working with it would be better spent researching a DIY build.
It's simple. NAS boxes are easy to install, tiny and very power efficient. Not to mention they're specialized in serving files. I just bought one of these (to replace Mac Pro, mind you) and I really like it so far.
As for features, there sure isn't a shortage of them on the DSM platform. I don't use XBMC instead of Plex because it's too primitive; I don't use a PC instead of this NAS for the same reasons.
Would really love to have hardware acceleration for this architecture.
I would very much like to purchase the next generation DSPlay to replace my aging mac mini as a Plex server, but must have 1080p transcoding support to do so.
