NAS streamer help/advice

[Road2Ruin]

Hi all,
Looking for a little info/advice on NHS streamers and storage.
I have a 'dumb' nas at the mo where I back up files to and stream to various TVs etc around the house. The trouble is the variety of formats the different devices need in order to play video files is a pain. Some like DIVX some MP4 h264 and others, well, who knows!
Looking at a new synology ds218 play, it seems to suggest that it will transcode video on the fly to other formats.
A few questions;
1. How does the NAS work out which codecs are needed or do I have to specify?
2. Does some sort of front end need to be on the TV?
3. Looking at a 2TB raid set up for redundancy, plus an additional total back up. Does this sound sufficient? Only using about 500Mb of a 3TB disk at the mo
Ta v much

[Kenny6868]

I use a Synology DS918+ to stream video to different devices. I have installed Plex onto the NAS and then use the Plex App on my TVs etc. Plex does all the hard work. You don't need to do anything other than point Plex to your library and it takes care of everything else.

Instructions on how to install Plex on your NAS can be found at https://nascompares.com/synology-ds218play-plex-in...

Alternatively, use the built in Media Server. Its not as good as Plex, but it should do the job in a similar way.

[padgett]

I know it's not the question, but I recently built a rasp pi Plex server with network drive, also running pihole as a bonus. Cheap and awesome. Streams everything perfectly.

Edited by padgett on Monday 24th August 17:42

[mikef]

Road2Ruin said:

Looking at a new synology ds218 play, it seems to suggest that it will transcode video on the fly to other formats

I believe that with the lower-spec Synology NAS units, only Synology's own DS Video, which is a bit basic in terms of media management, can take advantage of the hardware transcoding and Plex can't. I know that's the case with my DS415play

You may want to compare using this list before committing to a purchase

[Tim-D]

padgett said:

I know it's not the question, but I recently built a rasp pi Plex server with network drive, also running pihole as a bonus. Cheap and awesome. Streams everything perfectly.

Edited by padgett on Monday 24th August 17:42

Similarly converted an old tower unit into a server, using unraid and running plex - has been utterly faultless, plays everything - costs perhaps a bit more than commercially available options - it now sports 16tb of WD Red NAS drives.... but in my view it's been the best option and being PC based it's got plenty of "upgradeability" left in it....

Was actually very easy to do once you get your head around unraid - but plenty of support out there to do it...

[oilslick]

Tim-D said:

Similarly converted an old tower unit into a server, using unraid and running plex - has been utterly faultless, plays everything - costs perhaps a bit more than commercially available options - it now sports 16tb of WD Red NAS drives.... but in my view it's been the best option and being PC based it's got plenty of "upgradeability" left in it....

Was actually very easy to do once you get your head around unraid - but plenty of support out there to do it...

I did something pretty similar (albeit using some old USB disk enclosures I had because I'm using a cheap old mini-PC without any drive bays), but Unraid has been rock solid, really impressed with it. Bit of a steep learning curve mind!