QNAP TVS-863+ NAS Review

QNAP has once again equipped the a NAS 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 TVS-863+ 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 on our iPad Air 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 is MUCH faster with the TVS-863+, Our 34.1 GB 1920x1080p Avatar Video took only 4 hours to complete, almost a 3rd of the time it took the TS-879 PRO (outfitted with a Dual Core Intel® Core™ i3-2120 Processor 3.3 GHz) to complete . 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.

Manufacturer	Model	RAID	# Drives	Description	Transcoding
QNAP	TS-879 Pro	RAID 5	8	QNAP TS-879 Pro	11:08:43
QNAP	TS-470	RAID 5	4	QNAP TS-470	17:14:14
QNAP	TS-451	RAID 5	4	QNAP TS-451	31:08:43
QNAP	TVS-863+	RAID 5	8	QNAP TVS-863+	4:05:15