When trying to stream content from my WDMYCLOUDEX4, I get the following error message when trying to play TV shows off my NAS using the built in Plex app:
Your server is not capable of converting this item for playback at the current quality setting. Would you like to attempt to play the original quality?"
No matter if I choose yes or no it basically tells me my NAS is incapable of playing it. Yet, I can play the movie folder after receiving the same error listed above just fine after selecting yes.
Is there something im missing somewhere that needs to be configured? Or is this thing literally incapable of playing my media content?
Hello, this errors seems to be that the way that Plex is serving the files over the network is a higher resolution that the EX 4 is capable to trans-code on the fly. When you select yes, it lowers the resolution in order for the EX 4 to be able to stream it correctly.
Low end NAS solutions are not ideal for Plex setups when transcoding is needed. Transcoding video is a CPU intensive task that really is beyond the scope of this NAS in particular. The CPU is under powered, and barely supports pushing data to the limits of its network adapters.
If direct play is all that is needed, then this NAS unit is up to the task. If you must transcode, then I would suggest mounting your video library to a computer/server, and running plex from that device.
The ex4100 has a dual core processor and twice the RAM of the ex4. It would likely handle direct play better, but I doubt it would transcode very well either. I doubt any consumer NAS solution would handle transcoding. They are generally spec’d to push data, and not to perform video processing.
The ex4 is a decent low-voltage NAS unit that is good for just storing/serving data to the computers/media servers in my house. It barely has enough cpu to perform those simple tasks, but it does that job. If I had to do it over again, I would have built my own NAS using the FreeNAS software project.
I had a feeling it would come down to that. The FreeNAS software seems cumbersome to setup and I dont know if I would be able to do it. Id hate to buy all the parts only for the project to fall flat and there goes all that money.
Another issue is getting the data on off my current NAS to a new one. I dont really wanna buy new hard drives but I also dont have the storage space to transfer my current 3TB+ of data over to something else temporarily so I could take out my current hdds from my current NAS and use that.
So the issue is that the NAS unit isn’t powerful enough to convert and stream at the same time. The resolution was to basically convert everything to a file format (mp4/mkv) that it can run natively. Once I did that everything worked great.
