Plex

Plex Media Server allows you to stream media to numerous devices. These include smartphones, tables, notebooks, etc. As you can see in the screenshots above, setting up a Plex server is very easy.


Here's a quick look at some settings.


This document tells you which NAS servers are compatible with Plex, and according to it, the DS916+ supports 720p and 1080p files; however, it notes that it might struggle with the transcoding of some high bitrate HD media. We decided to give it a go regardless and tried some high bitrate 1080p files. As per usual, an Asus DSL-AC68U router, located at around five meters and two moderately thick walls away, was used for all of our wireless multimedia tests.

We initially tried a 24 Mbps media (bird24.mkv) file, which was reproduced just fine. This raised our interest and we increased the bar with the 34 Mbps version of the same media file, which the server's hardware managed just fine. To cut a long story short, we were able to stream up to 55 Mbps media files to our devices; however, such high bitrate streaming took some time to initialize. We even tried 4K media (NASA: Thermonuclear Art), which produced a delay of around 20-25 seconds at the start but was reproduced without frame drops and pauses afterward. The only problem was the very slow seek function.

In general, Plex's performance was pretty good. We were prepared for not so great results since Plex doesn't exploit the transcoding capabilities of the Intel N3710 CPU, but that was thankfully not the case.

Video Station

According to Synology, the Video Station app exploits the CPU's hardware transcoding capabilities, so we expect it to fare better than Plex.


You will be offered a quick tour through Video Station's options. You had better take it.


You will first have to pick the folder that contains your media.


Here are Video Station's other settings. The most important of them can be found in the "Advanced" tab, and as you can see, hardware acceleration is enabled in its transcoding settings. The app also provides the ability to auto search and auto download subtitles, which is incredibly convenient.


Our media files have been indexed, and it is now well nigh time to try some of them out in order to figure out how well Video Station performs. Our wired connection allowed us to reproduce everything we tried easily, but what matters the most is wireless streaming performance. In Plex, we weren't able to stream anything over 55 Mbps properly wirelessly; however, with Video Station, we went all the way up to 90 Mbps without running into problems.


We also tried 4K media and the wait before the content began to stream was lower than with Plex. However, the seek function was still pretty slow.


We tried NASA's Thermonuclear Art 4K Video and the Taipei 101 Fireworks Trailer 4K sample, which reproduced without any problems. Only the seek function was slow.


The only problem we encountered in Video Station was in a Transformers media sample, which had an incompatible audio track.