NAS Upgrade - Multimedia Support (Emby)

[Enquiries]

Hi, I'd like your advice on upgrading from a DS 713+ to ideally another Synology product. My main concern is playback performance from within my network and externally to clients using Emby (firesticks, apple tv's, mobile phones etc.). My current 713+ does not support hardware transcoding and the CPU is maxing out when playing / accessing / editing media files even within my network. I updated the RAM to its max but that has had little effect on performance (probably expected). I would love your take on the best product to go with given my main concern. I have been looking at the 720+ for the transcoding abilities and boost in performance. I have not considered a potential boost in using a network switch with my 1GB service nor the upgrade to using M.2 drives, and I'm not sure if either of these would bring about greater performance for transcoding / playback quality? I appreciate any advice and guidance and thank you in advance for your time and consideration. Best, Matt

[ed]

Yes, adding more RAM or cache will not improve transcoding performance. If you had SSD instead of HDDs in your NAS, this could improve things a little bit more. But not by far.
You need a good CPU or GPU to handle media transcoding.
DS720+ will certainly cope with 4k using Synology video apps. Emby might require something more powerful such as TS-473A with GPU card or Xeon based NAS.
If you only stream 1080p then ds720+ is all you need.

I hope this helps.