Synology DS-1019+ Plex Hardware Transcoding: This is Magic!

Back in 2012, I purchased my first Synology NAS: a five-bay DS-1512+. I added a five-bay DX-513 expansion unit a few weeks later, and for seven years I’ve been using it to store 1180+ movies and 2300+ TV episodes in MKV format. Because that Synology came with a weak Atom CPU, I had to use a Windows computer (a small Gigabyte BRIX) with a Core i7 CPU to run Plex on because the MKVs needed transcoding for most devices. That’s less the case now that so many devices are powerful enough to use Direct Play, but if I access my videos off-site they need to be transcoded. This system worked great for years, but I’ve been hoping to simplify my overall setup and get away from needing the BRIX.

When I got the DS-1019+ things changed: although it has a relatively wimpy Celeron CPU (to my external frustration, Synology refuses to put out a product with a Core i-series CPU – they go straight from Celeron to enterprise-level Xeon, with price tags to match) it has Intel QuickSync video transcoding capabilities.

The DS-1019+ was something I’d been waiting for because I’d read many reports of how well the hardware transcoding features of the Celeron CPU worked with Plex so I was eager to test it. When I got the new Synology set up, I asked some friends to help me by streaming a movie from it.

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A Technology Pickle: a New Small Form Factor PC or an Upgraded Synology NAS?

I’m in a bit of a technology pickle and I’d like some opinions from my geeky readers. For the past several years, I’ve had a small computer (a Gigabyte BRIX, Core i7 CPU) running as my 24/7 server. It runs Plex for streaming movies, runs CrashPlan for backing up all my data (as well as serving as the data location host for family member CrashPlan backups), Resilio Sync for always-on syncing with my other computers, and a few other apps. Connected to it is a 4 TB external hard drive, which is where I store copies of all my data (pushed and pulled there by a combination of Resilio Sync and SyncBackSE) and the CrashPlan backups from other people.
 
I also have a Synology NAS (a 1512+) from five years ago, stuffed with five hard drives and a DX513 expansion unit stuffed with another four more. I have about 32 TB of total storage and it’s where I keep my MKV rips from our movie collection – and this is what Plex uses for a data source (but the Plex server is on the Gigabyte BRIX). For the most part this works fairly well, though Plex (used via a Roku) routinely takes two tries to start playing movies – I think because the first attempt to pull the MKV from the mapped network drive fails – and it’s not uncommon for us to have a few moments of buffering in some movies. It’s very random though and I’ve never been able to pin down the source of these Plex glitches.

Continue reading A Technology Pickle: a New Small Form Factor PC or an Upgraded Synology NAS?