Today, I wanted to mess around with my DS923+ and see if it could handle transcoding. I’ve been using this NAS for a while now, mostly for storing my huge collection of movies and TV shows. But I’ve always wondered if it could do more, especially when it comes to streaming content to different devices.
So, I started digging around. I knew that the DS923+ has a pretty beefy AMD Ryzen processor, but I also found out that it doesn’t have a built-in GPU, which is kinda important for hardware transcoding. That’s a bummer, right? I mean, hardware transcoding is like the express lane for streaming – it’s way faster and smoother.
My Setup and Initial Tests
I decided to set up Plex on my DS923+ using Docker and Portainer. I’ve used Docker before, so it wasn’t too tricky. After getting everything up and running, I started playing some videos. I tried a bunch of different formats – h264, h265, even some 4K stuff. My goal was to see how well the DS923+ could handle transcoding these on the fly.
- First Try: h264 – Tried playing an h264 video, and guess what? It struggled. The playback was choppy, and it just couldn’t keep up. Not a great start.
- Second Try: h265 – Moved on to an h265 video, thinking maybe it’d be different. Nope, same story. The DS923+ was definitely not happy with transcoding this.
- 4K Transcoding? – For kicks, I threw a 4K video at it. I mean, why not, right? As expected, it was a no-go. The poor thing just couldn’t handle it.
Subtitle Struggles
Then there was the whole subtitle situation. I like watching with subtitles, and I noticed something interesting. When I played videos with PGS subtitles on my Samsung smart TV or Apple TV through the Plex app, it forced a transcode. But when I used SRT subtitles, it played directly without any transcoding. Huh, go figure. Subtitles, who would’ve thought they’d make such a difference?
Conclusion
So, what’s the final word? Well, the DS923+ is a great NAS for storage, but it’s not cut out for heavy transcoding. If you’re planning on streaming to multiple devices or dealing with different video formats, you might hit some roadblocks. It’s a bit of a letdown, especially if you were hoping to use it as an all-in-one media server. But hey, it’s still a solid device for storing your files, and for basic streaming, it does the job. Just don’t expect it to work miracles with transcoding.
If any of you have had similar experiences or found some workarounds, I’d love to hear about them. Maybe there’s a trick or two that I missed. Anyway, that’s my experience with the DS923+ and transcoding. Hope this helps someone out there!