QNAP TS-451 Review

To further entice you, the consumer, QNAP has equipped the TS-451 with full HD video transcoding capabilities.  This allows you to convert, or stream, your videos in various formats and qualities to play on different devices without requiring you to install 3rd party software packages.

Currently the TS-451 can allow up to 5 devices to connect simultaneously and perform on-the-fly transcoding.  QNAP has also added support for offline transcoding.  This will create copies of your HD movies in various quality settings and store them on the NAS.  This method requires a dedicated folder on your NAS to store the lower resolution videos, but can accommodate a larger number of simultaneous streams.  Offline transcoding requires conversion one time and frees up the system resources during playback instead of dedicating them to on-the-fly transcoding.  You can enjoy smooth videos by selecting a pre-rendered lower resolution to play the videos via File Station, Video Station, or the Qfile app for iOS & Android.

On-the-fly transcoding worked flawlessly.  We were able to select streams up to 1080p in quality and play nearly all of them without issue in the native QFILE app as well as VLC.  Unfortunately, the 1080p stream wouldn’t play in either application, but every other stream worked without issue.  This, however, is not a limitation of the NAS.  Instead, this is related to wireless bandwidth and the iPad itself.

Offline transcoding takes a TON of time to complete, especially when converting to more than one quality setting.  Our 34.1 GB 1920x1080p Avatar Video took hours to complete, more than a full day.  To benchmark the transcoding capabilities of the NAS, we compared a few QNAP NAS by transferring our Avatar video to the multimedia and configuring it to convert it to the following video quality settings: 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p.

Although the TS-451 took nearly twice as long as the TS-470 did to finish, it costs half as much.