[linuxdude314]

Why would you transcode on the NAS? Not what I’m suggesting at all; perf on most NAS is awful for that…

There’s a pretty well understood concept of what a NAS is; this isn’t a complicated philosophical problem.

A very common workflow in motion picture production is to use NAS for storage on a fast network, mount the SMB share, have a script/tool/app that monitors the ingest directory and writes to an output dir.

FWIW the key differentiator between a NAS and other types of network storage is the protocols they use.

If files is the main primitive, it’s a NAS; it’s its blocks it’s considered a SAN.

Sometimes SANs have NAS “heads” for clients that want file access or a block level storage device.

[otterley]

My five-year-old Synology DS418play has support for hardware realtime transcoding via its integrated low-power GPU. I think I paid about $600 for it. You can get a new DS423+ for about the same price.

[NavinF]

That only works if your output codec is something really old like H264

[otterley]

What's the point of transcoding to HEVC? If your playback device already supports it, and the file is already HEVC, then there's no need to transcode. And there's no benefit I'm aware of in transcoding from an older format like H.264 to HEVC. AFAIK, every device that supports HEVC media also supports H.264 as well.

It would be helpful to understand your specific use cases in more detail, particularly for batch transcoding (my understanding is that this solution is not about stream transcoding).

[NavinF]

Aight have you tried transcoding a normal file (today that means 4K resolution) to H264? It usually won't play because the standard limits resolution to 2048 pixels.