hey everybody its Lon Seidman and we're back with our monthly sponsored video
from Plex where we look at the plex media server and all the different
things that you can do with it and one of the questions I've been getting from
a lot of people lately is what makes a good plex server what should I be
looking for and a lot of folks have been looking for maybe something convenient
like a network attached storage device to act as the plex server and in the
past there wasn't many options to have a good plex server experience running on a
NAS device because these devices weren't doing the video transcoding all
that well but there have been some software updates to the plex media
serving software and now there are more NAS options to choose from and in this
instance we're going to be looking at a Synology NAS here and of course from
some of our previous videos we were running it successfully on a WD My cloud
PR 2100 so there are more options now I'm going to talk about what's working
here how you might be able to check your own hardware to see if it works and make
some other recommendations as well in this review now I do want to mention in
the interest of full disclosure this is a paid sponsorship from Plex however
they are not reviewing this content before it is posted and all the opinions
you're about to hear are my own we're also going to be talking about Synology
today and they are a past sponsor on the channel but are not sponsoring this
particular video and this drive here is on a long-term loan from Synology
because I do look at different features of this NAS from time to time so let's
get into it now and look at how Hardware transcoding is working on more NAS
platforms so right now we've got this Synology DS 216 plus 2 NAS streaming
to transcoded videos to these two mobile devices right now an iPad and an iPhone
and what's happening here in real time is that the NAS is making these videos
smaller so that we can play them back on these mobile devices more efficiently
and what it's doing is converting a blu-ray MKV file which is a high-def
high bitrate video into right now 1080p on both devices at around 12 megabits
per second or so so it's doing a lot to crunch down this video right now and
that's one of the key features of Plex that you can leave
the house and stream your media to your devices while you're away and if you
have a couple of people doing that if you don't have the hardware transcoding
built-in to speed up that process you won't have a good experience but we're
seeing it actually working pretty well on here right now and we're gonna switch
over to my control panel so you can see exactly what's going on here so right
now my iPhone is playing back the movie you can see that it's transcoding it and
because it's got this HW here it means that Plex is using the hardware features
of this NAS to do it the other movie here is also getting transcoded via
hardware now the compatibility on this is limited
right now to Intel processors that support the quick sync feature and I've
got a link that you can find in the video description that will take you to
this table and this is every Intel processor that supports the Quick Sync
transcoding and if your processor is on here it should and I quote very
importantly here should work with your particular device but there are some
NAS devices that might have a compatible processor but don't have a current
version of plex available to take advantage of that a great example is
that tera master NAS we looked at a few weeks ago yet has a quick sync
compatible processor but the version of Plex that they were offering was not up
to date in fact what I do recommend you do is download your Plex application for
your NAS directly from the Plex website by going over to the Downloads directory
here clicking on download and choosing your NAS platform many NAS platforms
allow you to download directly so for example if I go over to the Synology
NAS here I can choose my package like Intel 64-bit is the one you want that
will now download directly onto my computer here and then I can install it
through the Synology control panel what I found with tera master was that I
couldn't download the Terra Master package from Plex I had to go through
the little web store that tera master set up and because its version
of Plex wasn't up to date I wasn't getting the hardware transcoding working
so my advice would be once you find out that your NAS has the right processor
go on the Plex forums and ask around or look around to see if
other people are talking about that NAS and you'll have a good idea as to
whether or not that NAS will be the way to go again I had to install this
manually here to get it working but when it is working as you can see here our
CPU load here is about 40 percent right now
despite the fact that we're actively transcoding to movies in real time this
NAS only has a gigabyte of RAM by default as well so that makes it even
more credible here that we've got this Hardware transcoding working efficiently
on this particular NAS device and again this will give people more options for
choosing their particular Plex server now this feature though is limited to
Intel processors so when you're shopping for a NAS device you want to make sure
that it has an Intel chip inside for this to work there are many low-cost
NAS devices that are running with ARM processors that are not going to be
compatible with Plex Hardware transcoding many NAS makers like
Synology and QNAP and others have their own media serving software that does
support Hardware transcoding on those other processors but they will not work
with Plex so you definitely need to look for an Intel Quick Sync compatible
processor and maybe do a little bit of homework on the Plex forums to make sure
that your exact model is going to work now this one is running with an N 3060
processor again only a gigabyte of RAM right now installed on it and it seems
to be working just fine as you can see here there are newer models of the
Synology Intel based devices available now so the two that I would recommend
that are kind of lower in cost are the 718 plus that one has a quad core Apollo
Lake chip a generation up from this one so this the Apollo Lake ones might do
better with h.265 video the 718 plus cost 399 the 218 plus is 299 dollars
looks pretty much the same as what you see here physically that one has a dual
core processor so you can get in the door with a Synology NAS for $299 you
got to put some drives in them of course but you can get up and running perhaps
for a little bit less than what we saw with that WD drive we were looking at in
Prior videos so not bad on that front now this feature though will also work
with Intel based computers so if you have a low-end
Apollo Lake little mini PC like a nuc or something you can enable now with the
current version of Plex Media Server this Hardware transcoding feature let me
show you how to do that real quick so what you want to do is go into your
settings menu click over to transcoder and you'll see there isn't much to see
here at the moment because you have to enable the advanced function here they
do hide this thing a bit and you want to check on use hardware acceleration when
available you'll need to save the changes and then you've got to restart
your plex media server for Hardware transcoding to work so sometimes you
might have to reboot your device but if you're on Windows or something you can
just shut down the plex media server and load it back up again once you do that
hardware accelerated transcoding will now be enabled and you'll get the
performance that we're currently seeing here on screen pretty easy to do and I
do think it opens up a lot of possibilities now that if you've got you
know a two hundred dollar Apollo Lake based Intel PC kicking around you can
attach some storage to it and turn it into a pretty good plex media server
because those little nucs have the same processors we often find on some of
these devices here but do remember it needs to be an Intel based machine I did
want to show you a couple of things on this Synology control panel to think
about when you are installing the plex media server manually now you can get
plex media server through their package center without really having to jump
through any hoops but I found that the version they offer on the store is
sometimes a version or two behind whatever the current one is Plex pushes
out versions much more quickly than you might see updated in the package centers
that's why I suggested at the outset going and downloading that package
manually once you have it downloaded if you go into the package center and go
over here to manual install click browse and just go over to your downloads
folder where that package was downloaded to click open and that will get the
package installed automatically for you and it will function just like it would
if you installed it directly through the package center but there was one other
thing I wanted to point you at when you are setting this up and that is in the
control panel applet here if you go over to shared folder
and you go to the volume that you wish to share with Plex here you want to get
the permissions set up properly so you see here I created a Plex folder for
Plex to use but you also need to give permissions to the plex app for it to
use that it's going to create this user called Plex automatically and what you
want to do is just grant it readwrite access so that it can put files on there
and read them for you to use with your media devices otherwise you're not going
to put anything on there or access it so just setting that permission will get
you ready to go so that when you pop into Plex it will find all the media
that you put in those folders there so it's great to see there are more options
now for NAS devices to run a fully functional plex server that can do
real-time Hardware transcoding I'm actually pleased by how well it's
running here with a limited amount of RAM we're about 60% utilized right now
on the RAM but it's still pretty remarkable that we're able to have it
work as a NAS and be able to have two movies here transcoding in real time so
it's definitely working you will need an intel-based NAS which will drive up
your initial cost a little bit but it's good to see now that there's more
choices beyond just a WD drive to get this working some other folks have
written in about using an Nvidia shield as a server it will certainly work as a
server but I'm finding the shields get a lot of other things going on with them
as far as maybe somebody watching media on it at the same time it's trying to
serve up some media and my preference here in the house has been to go with a
dedicated device and I've been running now a NAS for my full media server
including the Plex thing here along with a couple of other things and I think I'm
almost a year into this now maybe eight months and I have not had a single issue
with it they don't consume a lot of power they're kind of single purpose
devices it just sits in the corner and just runs we've never had to reboot it
and I think really running off a NAS device like this if you are looking for an
in-home plex server is probably the best way to go and now you've got some more
choices let's have some discussions though down in the comment section and
we'll probably do some follow-ups to this as things develop this is Lon Seidman
thanks for watching this channel was brought to you by the Lon.TV supporters
including gold level supporters black eyed and blues music hour podcast Chris Allegretta
Gerard Nuberg and Kalyan Kumar if you want to help the channel
you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month
head over to Lon.TV/support to learn more and don't forget to subscribe
visit Lon.TV/s