Reply To: Which NAS, when a want to use Firefly/FLAC/Soundbridge/Roku

#15040
rpedde
Participant

@midi wrote:

I have a NSLU with firefly and it works nearly perfect and streams all my FLAC files (and some ALAC files) to my Roku M1001 and my Soundbridge.

Now I wanted to stream also videos and and I bought a QNAP TS-109. The experience with the TS-109 was very dissapointed. The preinstalled Twonkymedia supports no FLAC and ALAC files. The preinstalled itunes server, based on a mtdaap 0.2.4. can play the ALAC files, but the TS-109 was very slow with this action. I thought the TS-109 must be much faster as the NSLU, but in reality the NSLU is much faster. I can not understand this. Perhaps the old mtdaap 0.2.4 was the reason, but I could not found a instruction for installing a firefly nightly on the TS-109. So I will bring the TS-109 back to my dealer.

Now I am searching for a NAS working with on of the latest firefly nightly (and a video server). It should be not to difficult to install the firefly nightly. I am thinking about a Synology DS-107 and have found here an installation guide, but the experience with this seems to be different.

What is your experience and/or advice ?

Sadly, I’m not sure what I can recommend. Most of the nas vendors seem to not want to open stuff up enough for people to customize.

The buffalo linkstation stuff seems okay, but they dont’ document the bootflash, so you are stuck with the kernel that it ships with, or (depending on model), you might be able to do a two-kernel monte and get a custom kernel running. Either way, their boot loader sucks and messing with it to make it useful risks bricking it.

The maxtor stuff doesn’t seem to ship with everything necessary to build binaries that link to the firmware shared libs, causing segfault problems on custom code.

QNAP, Synology, etc, etc… none of them seems to be as open and flexible as one might want. Except the nslu2.

As much as I hate the usb connected drives and the extra power bricks, I can’t find something that’s as useful as a nas as my nslu2. Sadly.