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Synology as a streamer


Elvis

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Considering a Synology NAS to replace my Drobo 5D (not a NAS). 

I don't have any experience with streaming from a NAS with C4 or otherwise. I will be streaming old home movies, and the vast majority are SD or DVD quality. There are a plenty of HD movies, also. I'm thinking the Synology 1520+ will be more than adequate. Am I missing anything?

Thanks.

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13 minutes ago, Elvis said:

Considering a Synology NAS to replace my Drobo 5D (not a NAS). 

I don't have any experience with streaming from a NAS with C4 or otherwise. I will be streaming old home movies, and the vast majority are SD or DVD quality. There are a plenty of HD movies, also. I'm thinking the Synology 1520+ will be more than adequate. Am I missing anything?

Thanks.

I've been running Plex on a Synology NAS for many years. Moved over from Kaliedescape and never looked back. I stream 4K mostly all direct play without a problem. Only issues will relate to transcoding, and with SD or DVD you should be fine if you had to.

I also have Plex on the Sinology set up for my DLNA music. So you have additional choices.

And if you like to geek out, there's good chances you can run other apps in docker at the same time.

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Elvis said:

Considering a Synology NAS to replace my Drobo 5D (not a NAS). 

I don't have any experience with streaming from a NAS with C4 or otherwise. I will be streaming old home movies, and the vast majority are SD or DVD quality. There are a plenty of HD movies, also. I'm thinking the Synology 1520+ will be more than adequate. Am I missing anything?

Thanks.

Plex is a solid option on the Synology.  Just make sure you have capable clients that don't have to transcode your content and can play it directly (Rokus are good at this).

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Worth noting that watching from outside your home it will likely need to transcode.  Not sure if that's a use case for you here but I've found that to be pretty consistently the case when (before pandemic) we were on vacation or something.  We use Synology for NAS and love it - bullet proof and huge upgrade over the old Drobo - actually looking to expand it this year.  Haven't tried running Plex on it though because we have a mac mini running Plex to handle transcoding and multiple streams - our Synology model couldn't handle that - not sure it could handle the size of our library either.

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10 hours ago, Dueport said:

Worth noting that watching from outside your home it will likely need to transcode.  Not sure if that's a use case for you here but I've found that to be pretty consistently the case when (before pandemic) we were on vacation or something.  We use Synology for NAS and love it - bullet proof and huge upgrade over the old Drobo - actually looking to expand it this year.  Haven't tried running Plex on it though because we have a mac mini running Plex to handle transcoding and multiple streams - our Synology model couldn't handle that - not sure it could handle the size of our library either.

My Synology based Plex can easily handle the large library of Movies and Music. That said we run 2 streams at most and almost never transcode. Definitely can't transcode 4k.

But being you have a Mac mini, just run Plex and keep all the media on the Synology. Best of both worlds.

I'm hoping with the new Mac Studio coming out there's going to be a large number of minis hitting the used market, so I can finally make that change.

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I have a rack mounted Synology, and my wife likes to fall asleep to movies she knows so almost every night we stream a movie off the synology > an android TV that sits behind our bedroom TV.  zero issues - then again we are usually asleep within a few mins so it could be awful and we'd have no clue...now that I think of it...

 

Just kidding, we also stream movies when awake and its just fine.

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On 3/16/2022 at 7:45 AM, ekohn00 said:

My Synology based Plex can easily handle the large library of Movies and Music. That said we run 2 streams at most and almost never transcode. Definitely can't transcode 4k.

But being you have a Mac mini, just run Plex and keep all the media on the Synology. Best of both worlds.

I'm hoping with the new Mac Studio coming out there's going to be a large number of minis hitting the used market, so I can finally make that change.

Definitely - that's our setup - Mac Mini runs the Plex server while the files themselves are on the Synology - works very well.  I one thing about the mini though - I made the mistake of getting the 120 gig HD and that has gotten pretty filled with just the dB for Plex alone so can't upgrade it to new MacOS now because it is out of room....which is a lesson learned for me......next one will be 500 gig+ for sure.....

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  • 6 months later...

I installed Jellyfin docker on my Synology DS920+. It's free (open source) and has apps for most devices (Roku, Amazon Fire) and phones. It is well maintained. I followed a YouTube video and it was the first time I had any experience using Docker, it worked the first time and looks fantastic. Just drop the media files in a directory on your Synology. That's what I'd recommend as a no-cost option over Plex.

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I have a ds918 running DS Video (Videostation) and Plex. DS Video worked very well. I started to transition to Plex because it integrates with my digital movie posters (movieposterapp) and you can set it to play a custom trailer before each movie which is something I plan to add to my theater setup. I have 12TB of movies so far, no issues. Mostly Blu-ray quality, but have about 40 or so 4k UHD movies. 

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I wanted to clarify, Is the question about using synology as a streaming source withing the control4 environment? Or just using the synology nas as a streamer? My experience with the synology as a streamer has been amazing - I have a DS918 that runs plex as my media server. I also store all my media on the synology. However, my set up currently requires me to launch plex (either on my apple tv or native Google tv platform) then select whichever media I want to consume. I would be interested to learn if it is possible to program it as a source within control4.

Thanks


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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8 hours ago, whatisland said:

I wanted to clarify, Is the question about using synology as a streaming source withing the control4 environment? Or just using the synology nas as a streamer? My experience with the synology as a streamer has been amazing - I have a DS918 that runs plex as my media server. I also store all my media on the synology. However, my set up currently requires me to launch plex (either on my apple tv or native Google tv platform) then select whichever media I want to consume. I would be interested to learn if it is possible to program it as a source within control4.

Thanks


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Plex or movies within Plex?  I have a Plex icon in my navigator under Watch that when I select it automatically opens Plex. The Plex client is either running on a FireTV or a NVidia Shield in my house. So basically I don’t have to select Fire TV and then launch Plex. I select Plex and it automatically launches the Plex app on the FireTV 

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18 hours ago, whatisland said:

I wanted to clarify, Is the question about using synology as a streaming source withing the control4 environment? Or just using the synology nas as a streamer? My experience with the synology as a streamer has been amazing - I have a DS918 that runs plex as my media server. I also store all my media on the synology. However, my set up currently requires me to launch plex (either on my apple tv or native Google tv platform) then select whichever media I want to consume. I would be interested to learn if it is possible to program it as a source within control4.

Thanks


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

AppleTV doesn't have a way to launch an application from control4 directly. So you basically have to launch appletv from control4 then use the remote to select plex -> media....

 

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