Since Plex currently doesn't support the STMicroelectronics STiH412 SoC's video decoding capabilities, we only used Video Station for our multimedia performance tests.


Before starting these tests, we set the memory layout for single 4K transcoding in the control panel's hardware and power options. Synology says that enabling this setting will dedicate a block of memory to DiskStation.


After a quick tour of the Video Station's options, we picked a video folder.


The video folder is full of test files. Let's take a look at these settings before we proceed with these tests.


You can enable AC3 pass-through on Apple TV and enable or disable transcoding for public sharing in the Advanced settings tab. You can also enable the ability to automatically search for subtitles here.


You can set the playback quality to three settings: high, medium, or low.


Here are the subtitle options.

Multimedia Performance

It is now time to cut to the chase by revealing how well this NAS server performs with multimedia content, which is important since this NAS is advertised to be a multimedia-centric product. For all our multimedia tests, we used a RAID 1 configuration.

Every normal 1080p video we tried played back flawlessly through a wired connection. The NAS even properly reproduced 1080p files with a bitrate of up to 28 Mbps. We experienced frame drops and pauses with anything higher.


We also tried to stream 4K (2160p) videos through a wired Gigabit network. The Taipei 101 Fireworks Trailer was a no-go, unfortunately, which was a huge disappointment.


The second 4K video we tried, the NASA Thermonuclear Art The Sun, was reproduced properly, although we noticed small problems once we tried to skip parts of the video to proceed to specific time-stamps.


CPU utilization was significant while we streamed 4K content, and the volume's utilization was even higher. RAM utilization, though, was pretty low.

Through an 802.11ac WiFi connection and with an Asus DSL-AC68U as an access point, we checked on the quality of streaming video on a Samsung GALAXY Tab S 8.4 tablet. We installed the DS Video app on the tablet, and everything worked flawlessly with normal bitrate 1080p files. However, nothing with a bitrate over 20 Mbps streamed smoothly. The following screenshots show the hardware utilization and CPU temperature during our WiFi streaming tests. CPU utilization spikes occurred because we also tried to stream some 4K files though WiFi, which failed horribly.