Intel NAS or Media player for 1080p mkv files?

[weyland-yutani]

right, given that a media player like PCH A300 has a 800mhz cpu and an intel based nas, on a gigabit wired lan, has a 1.8mhz dual core cpu, why is the pch better at playing/ff/rw 1080p mkv files? what exactly is the pch doing with its 800mhz cpu that the intel based nas, isn't? does this make sense?

i'm trying to decide whether to just get an expensive nas and just let it do all the work, so i can watch files on any connected device. or get a less powered nas and stream files to several media players and let then do the work. quite frankly it 's causing me a great deal of confusion.

 

[graham.myers]

because they are SoC (System on a Chip). They are designed from the ground up to do one thing (usually well).

The Intel chip (usually an Atom) is a general purpose chip and requires other chips (on a mainboard) to cover all the other aspects. This builds in latency as they have to talk to each other.

A nas with multiple clients is the generally accepted methodology.

 

[next010]

As graham says the chip in the PCH is a custom design built for decoding video.

The videos aren't decoded on the CPU, the MIPS 800Mhz is far too weak for such a task instead the chipsets have hardware video decoders built in which take over decoding video. Same as on a PC with a GPU there is a hardware decoder for common video formats built into these and with the right software it will use these decoders instead of the CPU.

The commercial off the shelf NAS which use an Intel CPU are no good for transcoding video, these CPU's are Intel Atom's and lack the means to transcode video*. You need an Intel Core i3/i5 class CPU to transcode all video types effectively so that means a custom NAS like one of the ones graham sells ; )

The other option is get dedicated players for each room.

* The newest Atom chips actually include a hardware video encoder which would allow them to transcode video however no NAS are either using these chips or utilizing this feature.

 

[Trollslayer]

Even the Raspberry PI uses a chip with hardware transcoding to H.264.

 

[weyland-yutani]

thanks for the replies.

 

[weyland-yutani]

so, will a pch-a300 be able to stream a 1080p mkv/or blu-ray rip, from a nas(qnap ts-412 for example), over a wired gigabit lan, and be able to rw/ff/chapter search/seek etc., without a problem?

 

[next010]

so, will a pch-a300 be able to stream a 1080p mkv/or blu-ray rip, from a nas(qnap ts-412 for example), over a wired gigabit lan, and be able to rw/ff/chapter search/seek etc., without a problem?

Yes.

FYI there are much cheaper players that do that too unless your buying the A300 for another reason.

 

[weyland-yutani]

Yes.

FYI there are much cheaper players that do that too unless your buying the A300 for another reason.

really, such as? i just require a unit to handle all the native media files i have, storage isn't an issue but powerful stable decoding etc., is.

 

[next010]

WDTV Live, DuneTV101 or even Syabas own Popbox v8 which is like the A300 minus the built in jukebox. None of those have BD menu support either, BD's are best run through MakeMKV for lossless extraction to a single video file.

Dune generally have the reputation for most stable playback.