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Hello.

Unless a miracle occurs later today, I will have to replace my Synology DS1019+ NAS, which has about 40TB of video files (DVD, Blu-ray, 4K) running on 5 hard drives. Fortunately, I have a second DS1019+ that has a backup copy of my files. The backup NAS runs only when I'm backing up files, so it probably has a lot of life left in it. The last time I checked Synology's webpage, they no longer use Intel chips in their NAS units, so it appears that I will have to try another brand of NAS.

PMS runs on my NAS and on my M1 Mac mini. I use an nvidia Shield TV to stream content from the NAS to the TV. For a few files purchased from iTunes, I have to use my Apple TV 4K streamer.

After looking at the Plex/NAS compatibility page and the transcoding page, I have to ask how important is hardware decryption in the real world? I watch my videos only on my TV set. I haven't tried to stream anything remotely and never try to watch videos on my iPad or iPhone. I probably can convert my backup NAS into my primary NAS and then buy another NAS to use as backup NAS until the second DS1019+ bites the dust.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

I'm sorry your NAS has died.

Plex has this concept of Direct Play and Direct Stream. The short summary is if your Plex client (in your case presumably the NVIDIA Shield connected to your TV) can directly play the file hosted on your Plex, then the Plex server doesn't have to manipulate the file in any way, it only has to stream the bytes across the network. When this happens, the resources required on the server a very low.

My first Plex server was running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a large USB hard drive connected to it. I regularly watched large 4K rips on my TV hosted by the Plex server, but because my Plex client (running on an Apple TV) could Direct Play the files, everything worked fine even thought the RPI 4 is a fairly low powered device. If I ended up with a file my client couldn't Directly Play, then it wouldn't work well because the RPI 4 wasn't powerful enough to transcode the files in real time.

Since your scenario is fairly simple, one user watching at a time to the same client device all the time, if your files are being Direct Played, then hardware transcoding doesn't matter at all. The Plex client will show you if it is using Direct Play or Direct Stream when you're playing something.

Plex Support: Direct Play, Direct Stream, Transcoding Overview

Just a note to say it's possible that the Synology isn't completely dead - I've got two, and both have been "dead" at different times, only to come back to life after cleaning connectors. It's a pain to disassemble them, but the first time I did it, I pulled the drives out of the unit and put them in the replacement (new unit fired right up), so disassembly was mainly a "Why did it fail?" sort of thing. After the second or third reassembly, it fired up... and has worked since.

The replacement died for a few days, too, then came back to life after pulling all the connectors apart and putting them back together.

Hardware transcoding is very useful. dcoke22 brought up Direct Play and Direct Stream, but if your media stored doesn't match what the client or the connection to the client are capable of, you're kinda SOL. I like to watch my plex content remotely, over cellular connections, or stream it to my roku when traveling. This also lets me store maximum quality (4k UHD or 1080p remux) and on-the-fly transcode that down to what the client needs.

I'm using a custom 'home server' setup after graduating from my 1019+. Speaking of, I'm curious how yours died, if you've done any postmortem? I use an nvidia video card for hardware transcoding, but any recent intel cpu with a functional integrated gpu has what you'll need. I'd recommend looking into rolling your own nas if your server hardware needs at all exceed what is available in a prebuilt formfactor. Once I built the server, adding 10gbe was 30 dollars off ebay and the gpu was a replaced gtx 1070 unit from a gaming PC since I have an AMD cpu, so no hardware transcoding.

dcoke22:

From what I can recall, my videos generally streamed "Direct Play." I can remember instances, however, in which transcoding audio tracks caused problems with playback.

Woodstock:

I noticed quite a bit of dust near the fans, so a good cleaning is in order. Tomorrow morning, I will call Synology's customer support line, which has been very helpful in the past, and ask them about these issues. I hope the hard drives were not affected, and I do not want to do anything to harm them. If the main NAS is dead, the easiest solution would be to transfer its hard drives into the backup NAS. FYI, the hard drives in my main NAS are configured SHR, and the hard drives in my backup NAS are configured Raid 0 because they are smaller, older hard drives.

Zips9280:

Building my own NAS would be an interesting project but is beyond my technical ability.

Thanks to all of you.

Transcoding audio tracks can only be solved by increasing cpu horsepower for real time transcoding as audio transcode does not benefit from hardware acceleration, or running a pass to mux audio tracks down to a compatible format. I'm just finishing a running the https://tdarr.io software on my library, creating a 2.0 audio track for all of my movies. This way theres always an audio track and the server or client don't have to do the work to go from 7.1 or 5.1 to whatever the actual hardware supports.

Hello.

I bought a Synology 1621+ and installed my old hard drives. HDD migration worked without a problem. For fun, I tried playing movies using the Plex app on my iPad Pro (2022). Two movies were 4K and one was blu ray. They played without any problem that I noticed. However, when I tried playing a couple of movies on my 2017 iPad, the picture seemed to stutter a bit. In any event, the picture on my TV is better than it was with my dying NAS.

I decided to keep the shell of my old 1019+ in case I want to tinker with it someday.

One thing I'll post... my two Synologys are both on a UPS, along with half my other computers. Guess how I can tell the power glitched? If you guessed "the Synologys reboot", you're half right. The new one reboots, the other just shuts down, while the other computers just keep running.

Why did I bother putting them on a UPS? Oh, because one of them runs my surveillance system, too. They have an interesting selection of software you can install on them, besides storing video!