Can I use a Synology NAS to encode video with FFmpeg?

Question

I record a few hours of video footage every day, and then encode it on my computer which takes many, many hours. The CPU usage goes up to a level where I can't use my computer with ease.

Since I have a Synology DS415+ NAS with an Intel Quad-Core Processor @ 2.4 GHz, I got the idea that perhaps it could do both the storage and encoding of my videos.

I use FFmpeg, and have these questions:

1. Is it possible to run FFmpeg on the Synology NAS via a Terminal SSH service?
2. If so, where do I place the binary/install it?
3. Can I also install codecs for use, such as x265 (HEVC)?
4. How do I navigate to the folder where the videos are stored in SSH so that I can run my FFmpeg script?

Solution

Here's some info from 2018 on the Synology forum

I found out to make use of hardware acceleration (vaapi) you need to pass in certain flag explicitly for it work. Also I only got it working after using root access, probably some permission issue there.

Anyway I got it work with below commands, you may modify the in/out file path and give it a shot:

# root access
sudo -i

# using the same ffmpeg-vaapi in DSM6 video station, encode at 3Mbps VBR
/var/packages/VideoStation/target/bin/ffmpeg-vaapi -vaapi_device /dev/dri/renderD128 -i input.mp4 -vf 'format=nv12,hwupload' -c:v h264_vaapi -b:v 3M output.mp4

Comments

[sawdust]

That's possible. See forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=64609 and serverfault.com/questions/69128/…

[Elisa Cha Cha]

I've seen at least one modified ffmpeg binary allegedly provided by Synology, but it violates the GPL, and I'm unsure what modifications they've made (naturally they didn't provide any patches to FFmpeg to share due to the typical corporate mindset). However, I don't see any reason why you couldn't compile it yourself.

[P A N]

Just for reference, I successfully used the utility in the first link ("PoisonConvert") to encode videos to x264 on my Synology DS415. It was incredibly slow however, and hardly worth the effort on that particular device's CPU.

[mgutt]

Synology Diskstations have low power CPUs so it lasts very long to convert videos with them. Here you can see in the column "PhotoStation" how long it took to convert photos and videos: synology-wiki.de/index.php/… compared to other models. But finally a Rackstation or QNAP has much more performance.