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Video station transcoding worked on older hardware, not now on new hardware?


ilovepancakes

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So I had DSM 6.1 running in a 3617 loader v1.02 on a Dell T300 baremetal tower. I used the video station package to host my library. Transcoding worked with video station as in I could select playback quality "low" in the video player on either DS Video apps or the web interface and DSM would transcode on the fly and stream me a low quality version of the film or tv show. I can't say for certain but I am pretty sure this was software transcoding since I didn't have a GPU in the machine and I wasn't running the 916 loader.

 

Now.... I have recently switched to a virtual environment with ESXi and have successfully gotten DSM 6.2 running on a 3615 1.03 loader VM. Video station works, but the above transcoding situation does NOT. When I click a different quality besides original, it stops the video, and has a loading wheel that never finishes. If I change back to original, the video plays again.

 

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why.... I am running ESXi on an R720xd with E5-2630v2 CPU which I'm pretty sure is newer than the T300's CPU...

 

Anyone have any ideas where I can begin to debug or fix this issue? I am not even looking for true hardware transcoding, just transcoding to work like it did on the older T300....

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A few reasons... docker apps, including Plex, do not modify your DSM folders or configuration in any way.  Not always true with Synology apps.  The Plex releases on Synology lag pretty far behind development.  Docker is always a zero-day build.  A docker app is super easy to migrate to another platform as a backup/redundancy strategy.  You can easily integrate docker apps and their data repositories as it makes sense.  And, on docker you have full control over the application data location, for performance tuning or other reasons.

 

Once you Docker, you will never go back to Syno apps.

 

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EDIT: I installed and setup DSM 6.1.7 using 1.02b loader on ESXi. This loader and DSM are the same versions where I do have transcoding working on the Dell T300. This setup on ESXi turns out it does NOT work for transcoding, so I think we can conclude that the issue with offline transcoding is related to the hardware of my ESXi host or the fact that DSM is installed on ESXi instead of baremetal. Again, Dell T300 CPU is much older than my R720xd CPU so not sure why offline transcoding would work on older but not newer....

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15 hours ago, flyride said:

A few reasons... docker apps, including Plex, do not modify your DSM folders or configuration in any way.  Not always true with Synology apps.  The Plex releases on Synology lag pretty far behind development.  Docker is always a zero-day build.  A docker app is super easy to migrate to another platform as a backup/redundancy strategy.  You can easily integrate docker apps and their data repositories as it makes sense.  And, on docker you have full control over the application data location, for performance tuning or other reasons.

 

Once you Docker, you will never go back to Syno apps.

 

@flyride sorry for my lack of knowledge, is it just  virtualization method? does it have any disadvantages, like performance?

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I feel like i miss the words "the GPU is to the DSM6.2.1 vm in passthrough mode" and "the bootloader is configured to use a proper serial number".

Without those two, you won't be able to leverage Hardware transcoding for Videostation.

 

If you want to use hardware transcoding in Plex you still need the GPU in passthrough mode and a plex pass (as in plex subscription).

 

My applications are on docker since day 1 the packe for synology was released. I hate the messines of synologies packages. Also the overhead of running an application inside a container compared to a synology package is minimal. Docker provides lightweight application virtualization, which has nothing to do with heavyweight machine vartualization.

 

Though, Docker is not a first class citizen in the Synology world...

- the docker version inside the package is outdated: 17.05 on Synology, while the rest of the world uses 18.09

- due to the ui controlling every aspect of the docker engine, a lot of functions are crippled

 

On the other hand it has the easist to use UI of all solutions I have seen so far and it is absolute sufficient to get allmost everything up and running.

Edited by haydibe
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On 12/28/2018 at 10:35 PM, flyride said:

1) Uninstall Video Station

2) Install Docker

3) Install Plex or Emby or Jellyfin

4) profit

@flyride, Is there any nice guide to install them with docker. I mean, to be able to use it the container correctly and all the configuration that needs to be done...

Thanks!!

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On 12/30/2018 at 6:20 AM, bearcat said:

A bit off-topic I guess, but seeing some of you talk so warmly about Docker, before I try it out:

Some time ago, I read massive critics about the lack of security in Docker, has this been taken care of?

 

It depends on what you are using it for.  If you are comparing it to Syno apps, they all run as root with full access to the filesystem, so there isn't much of a standard to compare with.

 

Comparing with a full virtualization platform like ESXi, it is not secure. Docker needs to run as root to work correctly, and many apps need direct access to the O/S hardware (network I/O features etc) so they end up running with elevated privilege too.

 

Outside of this, you can limit file access to Linux groups and users, and it containerizes the app runtime environment (on Synology, inside of a BTRFS partition).  You can map in configuration folders (to make upgrades simple) and any other mountable filesystem directories.

Edited by flyride
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6 minutes ago, ed_co said:

@flyride, Is there any nice guide to install them with docker. I mean, to be able to use it the container correctly and all the configuration that needs to be done...

Thanks!!

 

Most docker apps are documented in a registry which includes configuration information.  Here's Plex's page for instance: https://hub.docker.com/r/plexinc/pms-docker/

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/2/2019 at 5:56 PM, flyride said:

 

Most docker apps are documented in a registry which includes configuration information.  Here's Plex's page for instance: https://hub.docker.com/r/plexinc/pms-docker/

I couldn't make plex work, but jellyfin... I don't know how...

Could you please let me know briefly... I am doing something wrong, for sure...

In the log it says: Critical: libusb_init failed

Should be great a guide of good practices using docker, as I see potential issues, just for misconfiguring it... could you please point out to a good place?

Edited by ed_co
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  • 8 months later...

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