I’m looking for some recommendations to improve my homelab. But first a bit of history to explain where I’m at and where I’m going. I currently have a super old Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 4B. Everything is working great, but I’m missing two things in this setup: -The ability to transcode -A NAS Now a little bit about me, I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade, so I know how to do stuff, but when it comes to hardware, I have close to zero knowledge… So I was a bit surprised when I plugged 2 external HDDs on my rpi and it shutdown them after a few minutes. I found out that it was a power supply issue, so I did the first thing that came to my mind at this time: I bought another HDD with external power supply, to then find out that having a self powered and an external powered HDD would still fail (although it took longer).
So now I know my mistakes, I should have gone with a NAS instead. I checked the Synology NAS and found out NAS are actually quite expensive. I’m looking for at least 4 bays. I’ve been looking at some DIY NAS, but I’m a bit lost. I found some builds using a Jonsbo N2 that seems cool but at the same time I’m reading the fans are always running at full speed and I’m afraid that the power consumption will skyrocket.
So to sum up, I would like to have a NAS, ideally that can transcode and is low power. In the beginning, I wanted to have a NAS and a mini-PC that can transcode to replace my Odroid C2. But it seems the NAS are far more expensive than the mini PC. What are the recommendations here?
-Synology (Can it transcode?)
-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board that can transcode)
-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board just powerful enough for a NAS) + a mini PC
-Something else?
My budget was 500€, but it seems I won’t be able to do much below 700€
How often do you need to transcode? If you’re streaming on your local network, you shouldn’t need to transcode. It’s only needed if you’re streaming while away from home.
Oh? This is weird, I have disabled transcoding on my rpi and I have some files that won’t play or the subtitles won’t load. I’m playing from my local network on an AndroidTV. I thought this was a file format issue and that transcoding would solve the issue
It’s possible it’s a file format issue. A video using a common format like H264 or H265 should work fine though. What format is the file and what codecs does it use?
The need to transcode has nothing to do with location. It has everything to do with the codec support on the client.
Modern clients support most of the modern codecs, so codec support isn’t as bad as in the old days when we had to use sketchy codec packs.
I mentioned the location because the primary reason to transcode is that you don’t have enough bandwidth to stream the original file. That’s not an issue over a LAN.