NAS hardware requirements

[simoncn]

(02-03-2013 13:37)winxi Wrote:  The following is not directly related to MinimServer, but for example with my DS211 (1.6 GHz ARM) I realized that it is not able to do realtime transcoding flac -> mp3 using ffmpeg. BubbleUPnP Server would have required this for reducing bandwidth when streaming over a mobile connection. I now have done offline transcoding for my flac-collection, and thus have a partially doubled library. With the DS112+, the chances are good that it would be even able to do flac -> mp3 online transcoding.
However, with the flac -> wav transcoding provided by MinimServer there are no performance issues even with my DS211. But you never know what else comes up in the future .

The flac -> mp3 issue is caused by the much higher cost of lossy encoding compared with lossless decoding. See this thread for some interesting discussion about this. Doing flac -> wav transcoding requires lossless decoding only.

I'm looking into the possibility of supporting other transcoding combinations in the future. I'll bear in mind that real-time mp3 encoding might not be possible on ARM-based NAS devices that don't have an FPU. This might change if a future version of ffmpeg adds support for fixed-point mp3 encoding.