Plex Media Server

We were very curious to check on how the DS415+ would perform with high bit-rate videos since Rangley CPUs lack a hardware-transcoding engine. So we went ahead and installed Plex to stream content to a client PC and an iPad mini. You won't find the Plex package in Synology's Application Center and can't install the package listed on Plex's official page directly. A problem due to the processor, it will hopefully be fixed soon. You will, for now, have to follow a specific procedure to install Plex.

First, visit Plex's official page and download the package for Synology NAS servers. The package will be in SPK, which Windows cannot recognize. You can either rename SPK to RAR and open it with Winrar or, if you have 7-Zip installed, open it directly.


Inside is an INFO file you have to open with a text editor. Add "avoton" at the end of the "arch" line and close, save and repack the archive.


Click on "Settings" inside the Package Manager and set the trust level under "General" to "Any Publisher".


You are now ready to manually install the Plex package.


Plex has now been installed and is ready to go. CPU utilization easily hits 100% with the media scanner up and running.


We were able to reproduce many high bit-rate 1080p files; however, doing so really taxed the CPU, and the system was rather sluggish to respond as soon as other tasks were running in the background (e.g. file transfers). The lack of a transcoding engine, which Plex must also support in order for noticeable performance gains to take place, is obviously a crucial disadvantage for HD content playback.

Video Station

With Video Station, CPU utilization was significantly lower during HD media content playback, as compared to Plex; however, some files couldn't be reproduced at all (e.g. the remastered blue-ray version of Predator (1987) Plex reproduced properly).