OK, so I currently have a Zyxel NAS running PLEX and it works well enough. Transcoding is completely out of the picture but it works most of the time. I have bought the NAS perk and instead of running PLEX on the Omnia (which from what I have gathered might not be trivial) I am thinking about internally connecting a SBC like the Raspberry Pi 3 inside the NAS enclosure.
There should be enough space and the 12 VDC for the fan could do nicely to power the SBC (with a buck regulator of course).
But now to my questions:
Which is the max power I can safely draw without damaging the Omnia?
How would you recommend I internally connect the SBC to the Turris? I’d rather not drill a hole in the enclosure and connect via ethernet. One solution would probably be removing either the 2,4 or 5 GHz wifi card and installing an ethernet card instead.
At first I have no idea how plex is complicated to setup, I never used it. And I don’t know answers for your questions, but I see few things why I personaly wouldn’t be hacking RB to nas box. At first, it is another heat source to already heated box. But also because if you can run it on RP than you can run it on omnia the same way. You can use lxc container and deploy for example Debian. That would be fine if you don’t need media acceleration. If you do (for example for transcoding) than you probably want RP if it works there (I just don’t know). In such case I would setup it outside of the nas box. Heat disipation is then simplier (both devices get quite hot on their own). And overal it’s just simplier. Does putting it all to single box solves something for you than just, it’s cool that I have it in one box?
It is not so hard to run Plex server on turris, you can use one of tutorials for rpi on google. I get it run in the LXC ubuntu container. But the turris is not enough powerfull to do transcoding, which is for me important as I want movies with subtitles. So I decide I will use one of my old laptop with i5 as standby server with Plex. Just for comparison, coding of 1080p movie take about 80% of Core i5 2410M, on Linux Mint 64Bit.
The other day i was on the forum of Emby Media Server and they were discussing VA-API for hardware acceleration to be used for transcoding. They got it working, so even with a not so powerful cpu, you could get Emby Media Server doing the work instead of Plex.
Although the last time i checked, Plex also uses FFMPEG for transcoding, they (plex) has not yet implemented the functionality to use a hardware acceleration possibility. FFMPEG has implemented this from version 3.x or 3.1…i am not so sure which it was.
It’s just a nicer package overall.
