Synology DS220+ NAS - Plex performance?

Bubo

Bubo

Bubo

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It's just about bloody well time I sorted myself out with a NAS, primarily to act as a Plex media server. Doing my research it looks like the Synology DS220+ might be a good option in terms of a value NAS with good overall performance, but I've seen some reports of dodgy Plex transcoding of H.265 media, where it really struggles not to buffer. Watching the vid below it seems to be a driver issue which this guy resolves in the video...


This video is dated August 2020, so my question is, is this driver issue still a thing with the DS220+ now, and if it is, is the fix in the vid still the way to resolve this? I want to rely solely on Plex for media serving, so this is could be a deal breaker if H.265 video is compromised without a fix possible. Apparently this issue applies to the whole range of DSXXXX+ NAS's, not just this one.

Does anyone have this NAS and know about this, or have any general comments about this NAS?
 
ChrisD. said:
You could get a QNAP TS-251+ with a quad core for similar money which is where my money would be placed.
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Thanks for the suggestion, but in the above video he explains that the Plex performance issue when transcoding is not related to the power of the cpu/ram on the board, but with a driver setting in the an xml settings file in Plex, which you have to manually edit. It seems to affect the 920+ as well for example. which is the 4 core NAS in the line. However, if you can confirm that the QNAP doesn't have this issue with Plex in the first place, and transcodes any H.265 file without any problems then that would be great if you have that NAS.
 
Have you thought about why you would you be transcoding video for local media in the first place? Either your initial media encoding is a problem or your client choice is a problem. Audio transcoding I understand, I have clients that can't directly support some of the more interesting audio formats that my amp can, remote devices over say 4G I understand, but in general if you are transcoding video for local clients, you probably already made poor choices before you got to that point.
 
As I understand it any media server has to transcode if the client does not support the video codec by default. So my TV which does not support H.265 video has to have the video transcoded into H.264 and streamed, which has to be done on the fly. As you say, if the client supports the format no transcoding takes place, and it just streams as is. So what I am trying to find out is, does the above fix in the video still apply, since it has been a year, or is there another NAS which does not have this driver problem with Plex. I have subsequently found out that hardware transcoding in Plex requires a paid up Plex Pass account, so this in itself may put the kybosh on using Plex anyway, but it would be nice to know if there was a NAS which did H.265 transcoding without issues, or independently of Plex.
 
I can't comment on that QNAP model specifically as I've not tried it but you often get much better hardware for your money with QNAP compared to Synology. What I will say is that the Synology OS is somewhat cleaner and more 'Apple' like compared to QNAP's QTS which while works perfectly fine it can feel less intuitive.
 
Bubo said:
As I understand it any media server has to transcode if the client does not support the video codec by default. So my TV which does not support H.265 video has to have the video transcoded into H.264 and streamed, which has to be done on the fly. As you say, if the client supports the format no transcoding takes place, and it just streams as is. So what I am trying to find out is, does the above fix in the video still apply, since it has been a year, or is there another NAS which does not have this driver problem with Plex. I have subsequently found out that hardware transcoding in Plex requires a paid up Plex Pass account, so this in itself may put the kybosh on using Plex anyway, but it would be nice to know if there was a NAS which did H.265 transcoding without issues, or independently of Plex.
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Plex on a 'smart' TV is a relatively recent thing, ergo the clients are generally slightly older and higher end (LG/Samsung/Sony) or more modern and cheaper eg Toshiba/Hisense etc. I'm surprised that a TV that has the capability to run Plex doesn't support H265, but either way why not encode into a supported format or use a not awful client? CEC is a thing and a Roku/FTV4K/appleTV/Shield will make your life easier.
 
Avalon said:
Plex on a 'smart' TV is a relatively recent thing, ergo the clients are generally slightly older and higher end (LG/Samsung/Sony) or more modern and cheaper eg Toshiba/Hisense etc. I'm surprised that a TV that has the capability to run Plex doesn't support H265, but either way why not encode into a supported format or use a not awful client? CEC is a thing and a Roku/FTV4K/appleTV/Shield will make your life easier.
Click to expand...

It seems I jumped the gun saying my TV doesn't support 265, I kind of assumed it didn't given how old it is. Turns out it does natively support 265/HEVC perfectly fine :embarrassed: I sussed this by playing a 4k hdr file using my PC as the Plex server and on the TV it showed as "Direct Play" under file info, which I see now means it was not needing to transcode. So in theory Plex on any NAS will not have to do any work as such and pretty much any decent one will be fine for me. Now I just got to decide how much I am willing to spend on storage and make a decision on which NAS to go for.
 
It did seem like an unusual combination of variables, but without knowing the make/model I really couldn't think of an obvious contender. Remember you can always add a standalone Plex box later if you need to, ex corp desktops that are ideal start at £60-80, another £20 gets you into the sort of uSFF form factor kit that could sit on-top of your NAS and sip power/run silently.
 
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