Hello,
I just bought a TS264 NAS, I installed Video Station and CAYIN Media Viewer on it, I enabled all HW transcoding settings but I cannot play a “on the fly” transcoded video on my Pixel 8 Pro phone with the Qvideo app. I get an error message like “for on the fly transcoding, Video Station is needed”.
Can someone help me?
Thanks in advance
Alex
CAYIN Media Viewer is a new thing. Many QNAP apps depend on the old CAYIN MediaSign Player instead. Did you try installing the CAYIN MediaSign Player app?
Thanks for your reply!
I installed the MediaSign Player app and now the real-time transcoding seems to work with Qvideo.
Unfortunately, it takes more than 1 minute to open any video and the Qvideo is “not responsive” at all (even the simple browsing among NAS HD folders is awful and extremely slow).
I bought the TS-264 (upgrading from an old TS-112p) only to be able to easily view photo & video (4k) from my mobile phone, but I’m really disappointed by these poor results…
PS: Indexing and thumbnail generation are completed, CPU almost unused, RAM use below 20%, 8 TB available on HD, more than 250Mbps in download/upload for the NAS connection to internet, Pixel Pro 8 under 5G coverage…
You can try jellyfin (free) or Plex (freemium) to see if that works better for you. Both leverage hardware transcoding of the NAS you got.
Thanks for your answer!
if I don’t fall in mistake, Jellyfin needs a VPN to be set up. I will give it a try if I cannot solve the issue in different way (I’ve never set up a VPN before and I think is not very simple…).
Plex is asking me to pay for the client on my mobile phone to watch video in remote, so it seems it is not freemium. Am I doing something wrong?
Plex recently changed some streaming rules…I have a lifetime Plexpass so no extra costs…I think the mobile app always cost money (the web app was free)
Jellyfin installed via container with read only shares for video sources, should be pretty safe, no need to access via VPN, but no relay service available like on Plex.
Hi @Alessio
From experience, video performance is often significantly related to its encoding. To help us understand your situation better, could you please provide a video sample?
If sharing a sample isn’t convenient, any information about the video’s source would be helpful. (record device, encoding format, resolution…etc.)
Thanks!
Hi,
the videos I tried to open were recorded by many devices in the last 20 years, with different resolutions, multiple encoding formats, etc. (ranging from 320x240@15fps to 4k@60fps). I always got the same result: more than 1 minute to open the videos; Qvideo and Qumagie lagging for seconds during browsing, thumbnails not showed.
So, I deleted and recreated the thumbnails from Multimedia Console.
Same results.
So I excluded from the “scanned folders” some 3TB of videos, deleted and recreated the index and then the thumbnails from Multimedia Console.
Now Qvideo and Qumagie are working almost fine (few seconds delays) and realtime transcoding is working in Qvideo.
But I still have stability problems. For instance, while I am now writing, I cannot open the Multimedia Console of the NAS from the remote PC that I am using: the Multimedia console window remains blank. It happens continuously, this morning also with the QuLog Center (real time update: QuLog Cenetr is not opening again now!!!).
I have to restart the NAS to make everything work again… for a while.
Really I’m puzzled and disappointed by these problems…
Hi @Alessio
We understand that your issue improves after a reboot but reoccurs after some time. This pattern suggests we need our support team to conduct further troubleshooting.
Please open a support ticket via our Helpdesk or through the following link: Customer Service - QNAP
I have a TS-873 and recently had a ticket open with QNAP about transcoding on the fly. I even had an Nvidia GPU installed and was having problems getting transcoding on the fly working.
In this process it was pointed out to me that my load averages were way too high (using the Linux command “top” in an ssh shell). They were in the 30s when they should be under 10. Turns out I just had too much running on my 873. Removing QVR Pro drastically reduced my usage and now hardware transcoding works great.
I’ve since removed my GPU as I wanted to use my 10Gbit fiber NIC to communicate with another NAS I recently purchased.
But I would check what load you have on your NAS. The Ryzen CPU in the 873 is a lot less powerful than a Core i5 or even a core i3. Transcoding is an intensive process.
Also Plex works great for free if you use a VPN. I use it that way all the time.
Hi,
thanks for this information.
Realtime transcoding now is working on my NAS (But I had to install MediaSign Player app and to recreate index and thumnails).
I’m still disappointed by the fact that Qumagie does not support realtime transcoding (only Qvideo does), but this is different issue…
QMagie does real time transcoding. Touch the gear icon in the player window and select your resolution.
It certainly works better with a GPU.
I just tried QMagie again on both a web browser and my iPhone app. Both have real time transcoding options and both work.
Now the issue could be that your TS-264 has a low end Celeron CPU. So it may just not have the horsepower to do some of the transcoding the way you would like it. Depending on what else is running on the NAS, you may get better results sometimes than others (example: ClamAV takes a huge amount of resources and slows everything down when doing a virus scan. Qsirch is another resource hog as well.)
Sorry, I was referring to the Android Qumagie app.
The web browser based Qumagie app does realtime transcoding, and it works on my NAS.
Qvideo Android app on my Pixel 8 does realtime transcoding and it works on my NAS.
Android Qumagie app on my Pixel 8 does not support realtime transcoding. It says “Not available”.
Perfect reason to migrate to an iPhone! 
Not sure why the Android version of the app doesn’t support it. That’s odd.
You should also be able to do real time encoding via Qfile as well but I don’t think it lets you up convert.