Plex has a powerful transcoding service baked in, and if you have the paid Plex Pass plan, you can unlock hardware acceleration - that makes a huge difference for transcoding 4K files.Įven if you're using an iPhone, iPad, Amazon tablet, an older smart TV, or an Android phone, you can confidently play your media library on any device without any issues. The biggest reason for Plex's dominance has to do with the fact that it can play any file on any device. What is Plex transcode, and how does it work? It sorts your music, movies, and TV shows into relevant categories, and adds high-resolution album art, covers, trailers, and metadata automatically. Also, as the content is streamed locally within your home network, it doesn't count toward your internet bandwidth costs. Plex also does a great job with media organization. Basically, you can install Plex on all the devices you own. First up is the fact that it's available on just about any ecosystem: Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Android TV, all streaming dongles, and most smart TVs. It is often considered to be the best media server around, and there are a few reasons for that. Find out more about how we test.Īs a high-level overview, Plex is a free media server utility that catalogs your media collection and makes it available for streaming on all of the connected devices in your home. Why you can trust Android Central Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. That said, the DS723+ has the best software features of any NAS server, with DSM 7.1 offering native servers for audio and video playback, document collaboration, Plex media streaming, backing up data from all the devices in your home network, and a whole lot more. I would have liked to see at least 2.5GbE connectivity here as most other NAS servers in this category offer multi-Gigabit connectivity as standard, but that isn't to be. You can also switch to 10GbE networking via a $150 networking card, but out of the box, you'll find two Gigabit LAN ports. The NAS also lets you use M.2 slots for storage, giving it a key edge over its predecessors. The DS723+ does a brilliant job when using Plex's native direct play feature, and I didn't run into any issues when streaming a high bitrate 4K stream on my TVs. I use Plex on about a dozen devices in my home, and while I have Plex Pass, I haven't had to use the transcode feature for a few years. That said, free Plex users are limited to software transcodes, and you'll need a paid Plex Pass account to get hardware-accelerated transcoding. This shouldn't be a limitation to most users as most modern devices have the requisite codec for video playback via Plex anyway, but if you're sharing your Plex library with friends and they're using an older iPad, they may run into bottlenecks. That said, the Ryzen R1600 doesn't include an integrated GPU, so you miss out on Plex transcodes. That's great in daily use as the DS723+ is noticeably faster than its predecessor - the DS720+ - and the likes of the DS220+. There are inherent advantages to this move as the Ryzen hardware is significantly more powerful than Intel's offering. Synology is doing things differently with the DiskStation DS723+ the 2-bay NAS features AMD's Ryzen R1600 instead of the long-standing Intel Celeron series. If you're looking for drives to fill up the DS920+, the 8TB IronWolf NAS hard drive is the ideal option. If you think that the 64TB of storage may not be enough, Synology has a DX517 expansion unit that adds five drive bays to your DS920+ - that's another 80TB of storage. That's where the two Gigabit Ethernet ports on the DS920+ come in handy, and the four drive bays that can hold a total of 64TB of storage should be more than adequate for most users. The DS920+ handles 1080p and 4K transcodes just fine, so if you're using an older TV or a device that doesn't have the latest video codecs and containers, the NAS will decode the file and play it on the TV.įurthermore, when it comes to playing 4K files on your home network, you'll need to consider the network bandwidth - 4K files have a bitrate of over 100Mbit - and storage. The DiskStation DS920+ is an ideal Plex media server if you want to stream 4K content on your devices. You get the same dual-Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and there's also an eSATA port at the back. You get a faster Intel Celeron J4125 chipset, 4GB of RAM out of the box, M.2 slots for SSD caching, and four drive bays that can hold up to 64TB of storage. This NAS is the ideal choice if you share your Plex library and need additional bandwidth, or you want to transcode 4K media. The DiskStation DS920+ has the same foundation as the DS220+, but with a few key upgrades.
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