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NAS for transcoding on a budget? - Enquiries - 02-28-2020
Hi,
In these times of quarantine, I would like to offer my 90 year old Dad in self-isolation some entertainment in form of old classic movies he'd enjoy.
The idea being, I want be able to send him URL links to movies I have on my NAS and that he could then click on to start playing them on his PC or smart TV.
Or if possible and even better, have him browse remotely from his home a folder on my NAS where I would put all the old movies that interest him. As I'm sure you can imagine when dealing with an 90yo, it has to be VERY simple (point & click).
I have bought a Synology DS215j only to discover after that it won't allow me to share my movies with him (or transcode as I've now learned it's called).
Could you please tell me which NASes would be able to do this? Ideally, I would like to look at the 2nd hand market for this, so some older NAS would be my first choice to keep the cost down (I'm not made of money, especially in these trying times!).
I mainly have 720p movies encoded in HEVC/x265 and x264 in mp4 and mkv container and the occasional avi file.
Until now, I have only researched my options in the Synology DS range and what I came up with as suitable, which might not be exhaustive are the Play series and the Plus/+ series starting from the 215+. And the 715 as well. Are there others? (again, in the same price range and I don't need anything more than a 2 drive bay).
And then there are the QNAPs which I know nothing about so if you could offer some suggestions based on what I've explained above?
From what I understand, these are the two main leading brands when it comes to 'serious' quality NAS offering more flexibility and reliability (once I have one, I would consider maybe setting up a mail server for myself as well as backups for the whole family).
Thanks in advance!
(I would have posted first in the forum but I saw so many unanswered questions, I just thought I'd have better look this way.
Cheers,
Kenneth
NAS for transcoding on a budget? - ed - 02-24-2021
Yes, Synology J series NAS is not made for multimedia sharing remotely. Any plus series NAS from 2015 should be able to cope with 720p streams potentially. If you have your internet fairly fast then you might stream this quality videos without even transcoding them. Just make sure they are in MP4 format. The latest model Synology have is DS218+ and DS718+. But these will be more expensive in comparison.I hope this helps.