Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Videostation Vs Plex

I have spent alot of time with Synologys Videostation and Plex, to decide which one that's the best for me, streaming to iOS devices. Plex was pretty much unusable on my old DS412+ unless I played Mp4 files. The problem is that Plex has to transcode the video (=requires lots of CPU power) most things if you need subtitles (and I do). If you don't need subtitles Plex would probably work alot better on any setup. Plex is slightly more useful on my DS415+, however 1080p content is still a bit of pain to transcode. Perhaps that can be fixed if they ever decide to compile a version optimized for the DS415+. Plex comes with a pretty nice interface, however some settings are really confusing and they really need to work on that. Plex has a nice "plex sync" option to be able to download videos to your devices for offline playback. This is nice, but you have to pay a monthly fee to be able to use this, which is a bit of a bummer.
Videostation has improved alot since it was released and can now play any h.264 content I've tried without transcoding, even with subtitles. Drawback is that DTS audio isn't supported but such audiotracks can be recoded in just a few minutes with a decent tool (like "Xmedia recode"). Videostation can only download mp4-files for offline-viewing at the moment, I really hope they implement other formats aswell.
So, which one to use? Well. Currently I must say that Videostation works better than Plex, with lower cost in terms of performance. Plex has a few useful features, but as mentioned, it's alot more CPU-hungry.

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