Recommend me A fast 1080p Transcoding NAS

[kamin99]

I have QNAP 219IIp (4 years old) and 3TB x2 Seagate HHD , and last week one HDD died on me and although I was running RAID1 I could not access my Data. QNAP support logged into my NAS and couldn't retrieve my Data including 600 dollars worth of High Definition Music and plenty of movies and my Macbook pro Backup

QNAP 219pII on many occasion failed to transcode 1080p movies and now I'm seeking advice on upgrading to a fast NAS to transcode on the fly "as they say" and looking to hear from forum members experince with that
I have in mind QNAP TS-251 or Synology DS415 play with 4 GB x2
any thought on that

Thanks

 

[azazel1024]

What kind of storage and what kind of quality do you need? IMHO, transcoding on the fly is visually less quality than a high quality transcode in advance and then playing back the resulting file. Which makes sense since it takes a lot more computational power to make optimal decisions for compression.

Also means you can tamp down on required storage space. So, my suggestion would be to transcode everything using your computer and then store the resulting files on the NAS.

Sadly it also hopefully stands as a good lesson that RAID1 is not a true backup. Keep a real backup of all your data. Yes it costs more. My current setup is 2x3TB drives in RAID0 in my desktop, the same in my server and a 5TB USB3 hard drive. The desktop, server and external HDD have their data mirrored across them with weekly and monthly backups respectively.

Yeah, it's about $300 of extra cost, but it has saved my bacon twice with fairly important data, some of it absolutely not replicateable in one instance (pictures and documents from my wife when she was in college and grad school) and in the other, would have taken a LOT of time and effort to reconstitute (hundreds of hours at least). A single back-up wouldn't have helped as it was human error that failed to replicate data to the primary back-up before wiping the desktop drives, but it had been copied to the secondary back-up first.

Also had a drive start dying in my server, and with the external back-up drive I was able to limp along for a few months before I could afford the time and money to replace the drives in the server, because I knew I had at least one good back-up in case a drive in my desktop started a death spiral too.

 

[thiggins]

Buy as powerful an Intel-based NAS as you can afford. I lean toward Synology vs. QNAP for easy to use transcoding.

 

[sfx2000]

Buy as powerful an Intel-based NAS as you can afford. I lean toward Synology vs. QNAP for easy to use transcoding.

Look at something that has IvyBridge (Core i3/i5/i7) or Baytrail-D (J1800/J1900) - they all have Intel Quick Sync Video hardware trans-coding support, and more than fast enough for real-time...

 

[kamin99]

Thanks guys for the help
QNAP TS-251 has intel celeron 2.4 , I don't think I can afford core i3,i5,i7
and also thanks to azazel1024 , I no know that transcoding on the fly is no that good ,and That RADI1 is a joke and unreliable
time to rethink my options

 

[sfx2000]

QNAP TS-251 has Baytrail-D J1800 as a dual-core - it has Intel Quick Sync video, and should be fast enough for at least one real-time stream...

 

[kamin99]

QNAP TS-251 has Baytrail-D J1800 as a dual-core - it has Intel Quick Sync video, and should be fast enough for at least one real-time stream...

ok then I'm sorted then , Time to save money for it!

 

[kamin99]

oh one last thing would the HS-251 be similar in performance to TS-251 , HS looks more modern at least , but not sure how it compaires to TS
thanks

 

[sfx2000]

oh one last thing would the HS-251 be similar in performance to TS-251 , HS looks more modern at least , but not sure how it compaires to TS
thanks

It's your money, make your choices

If it doesn't meet your needs, send it back home...

The HS-251, not much known about it... but with two disks and the CPU board, the one concern I would have is keeping it cool enough... sitting inside a media center cabinet like that might cook it...

 

[azazel1024]

On the fly transcoding can work fine. It is a question of what your expectations and demands are. If I were transcoding on the fly to my phone, fine with me. Maybe to my tablet too. To my TV, nope. I've tried that route and the quality was just not good enough. That isn't to say it was BAD, but I noticed a visible difference in streams between a very high quality BR to 1080p h.264 transcode and transcoding on the fly the same BR source. Mostly in the "suspect" places, like dark scenes, fog, high motion, etc.

It can still be just fine, but since I personally notice a difference in some scenes with some sources and also holding on to the BR sources (other than the physical BRs) means needing about 3-5x the storage space as very high quality 1080p or 720p rips...

I've certainly spent a lot of hours ripping my library though and keeping the BR ISOs would have saved a fair amount of up front time. Makes it a lot more portable though since I can throw a 3GB 720p on my tablet instead of needing to transcode when I wanted to take it with me.

Anything with quicksync should be able to handle transcoding on the fly and it'll result in decent quality.

 

[sfx2000]

QSV should be fine for on-the-fly transcodes, and the J1800 in the x51 should be about the same as J1900 in the x53's - as the GPU and QSV functional blocks are the same...

Baytrail-D uses Gen7 Intel Graphics like IvyBridge (IVB), just less EU's (4 vs. 6 on IVY HD-Graphics) - but the QSV block on BayTrail is like IVB, not Haswell...

QSV isn't something I would recommend for first generation transcodes, as CPU will always have better quality and more options...

 

[Trexx]

I would think though that the extra cores/cache on the j1900 in the TS-453 should give some transcoding uplift, or minimally minimize trancoding impact on other running NAS processes.

Another thing to keep in mind is where are you VIEWING the transcoded data from?? If you are viewing it remotely (over cellphone, remote wifi,etc.) your Internet Upload speed will have an impact on what resolution you will be able to transcode to as well.

 

[sfx2000]

QSV is an odd-duck - at a very high level, it's a pipelined fixed function block on the chip, and it's really dependent on CPU clockspeed and I/O (Memory and Disk)... So it really doesn't matter how many cores/cache/etc... so Baytrail-D on a J1800 is about the same speed as a Haswell Core-i7 Quad, clock for clock...

x264 has several code paths - QSV is one, OpenCL is another, CUDA and UVD, and of course, on the CPU directly... and of course, various ARM things..

QSV is pretty awesome at the moment... may not have the best quality, but feed it the right content, and it's the honey badger of transcoders for consumer grade gear

 

[sfx2000]

Another thing to keep in mind is where are you VIEWING the transcoded data from?? If you are viewing it remotely (over cellphone, remote wifi,etc.) your Internet Upload speed will have an impact on what resolution you will be able to transcode to as well.

For real-time - trexx makes a great point - it's really performance of the end-point client and network speed...

 

[azazel1024]

QSV is an odd-duck - at a very high level, it's a pipelined fixed function block on the chip, and it's really dependent on CPU clockspeed and I/O (Memory and Disk)... So it really doesn't matter how many cores/cache/etc... so Baytrail-D on a J1800 is about the same speed as a Haswell Core-i7 Quad, clock for clock...

x264 has several code paths - QSV is one, OpenCL is another, CUDA and UVD, and of course, on the CPU directly... and of course, various ARM things..

QSV is pretty awesome at the moment... may not have the best quality, but feed it the right content, and it's the honey badger of transcoders for consumer grade gear

Very much. I haven't checked the J1800 vs J1900, but using the QSV on my i5-3317u and on my i5-3570, vastly different beasts, they both clock in at roughly the same CPU usage when doing on the fly transcodes.

That is to say a very, very tiny % CPU load. They also manage to transcode at roughly the same rate when doing handbrake to test just QSV (within 10% of each other).

I doubt you'd notice any difference between the J1800 and J1900 if doing Quicksync transcoding. Now, depending on what else you are using the NAS/server for, yes, the extra performance of the J1900 might be a nice benefit.

 

[sfx2000]

If one is looking for content to check transcoding (either real-time or not) - here's a great source of test files - same content, but many different formats... and it's Creative Common's licensed, so no worries about copyright issues..

http://bbb3d.renderfarming.net/download.html

Quick note about Handbrake on the desktop - the default is to use software on the CPU, to get QSV to work, one has to select it as the Video codec, and at the moment, I think QSV is limited to Windows only - and the Intel driver is relevant for speed and improvements to output quality...

I'm told QNAP uses a custom build of the x264 codec that enables QSV on QTS 4.1 for the Intel based units..

 

[kamin99]

Thanks Guys, so much great info and very helpful indeed
I will need it to transcode My Bluray Disc rips to watch over a 50 inch Tv screen and I'am vey particular about the quality of my Videos and will need to pass through 5.1 surround as well (DTS-HD or simillar) , I will either use Plex or the QNAP HD station via XMBC
It will function as Music server for FLAC 24/192 Lossless music and act as TimeMachine for 2 Macs
My internet is 240Mb/24 mb

 

[Trexx]

Glad to help, and jealous of your bandwidth. Sounds like a nice setup. I use XMBC for my TV, but Plex for my remote ipad/iphone usage. Partly because I don't want to pay for Plex Pass just to use it on my TV, and I like the flexibility of XBMC more for my home viewing anyway.

 

[kamin99]

Trexx , I only started paying for Plex pass when the new version came out to use it on Roku 3, but I dont think the free version is far behind anyway!. I now need to start saving to get a new QNAP

 

[sfx2000]

Some comparative numbers for QSV vs Software - this is handbrake 0.10.1 on Windows 8.1, with Intel HD Graphics Drive 15.3.619

Test CPU is Celeron 2957U (2C/2T, Haswell-ULT @ 1.4GHz) - 4GB RAM, 500GB spinning disk..

This is as close as I could get to a QNAP x51/x53 and get some results for QSV vs. CPU..

The QNAP, I don't have as many config options - but let's just say, QSV kicks butt...

Note 1 - The Hsawell-ULT is a "big core" vs. the J1900 being Silvermont "small core", but generally they're pretty close in a multiple thread environment - and x264 will use every thread it can - handbrake or otherwise... since the J1900 and J1800 run base at 2.0GHz, and turbo up to 2.4GHz, real time transcoding shouldn't be a problem...

Note2 - on a Core i7-4790, CPU on this same test is around 650FPS, QSV is around 350FPS, but that's a CPU with 4C/8T and turbo's up to 4GHz)

Source File : big_buck_bunny_480p_surround-fix.avi

Output - MP4 with "Normal" selected in Handbrake...

QSV numbers first... CPU utilization here is around 70%

[18:12:38] encqsvInit: using encode-only path
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: TargetUsage 4 AsyncDepth 4
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: GopRefDist 3 GopPicSize 24 NumRefFrame 1
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: BFrames on BPyramid off
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: AdaptiveI off AdaptiveB off
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: RateControlMethod ICQ ICQQuality 20
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: CAVLC off
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: ExtBRC off
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: MBBRC on
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: Trellis off
[18:12:38] encqsvInit: H.264 profile Main @ level 4.0
[18:12:38] qsv_enc_init: using 'hardware (1)' implementation, API: 1.15
[18:13:42] reader: done. 1 scr changes
[18:13:42] work: average encoding speed for job is 223.485092 fps​

Now on CPU only... CPU utilization at 200% - basically railed...

[18:06:53] encx264: unparsed options: level=4.0:ref=1:8x8dct=0:weightp=1:subme=2:mixed-refs=0:trellis=0:vbv-bufsize=25000:vbv-maxrate=20000:rc-lookahead=10
x264 [info]: using SAR=1/1
x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 SSE4.2 LZCNT
x264 [info]: profile Main, level 4.0
[18:09:23] reader: done. 1 scr changes
[18:09:24] work: average encoding speed for job is 94.844742 fps​