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

[midi]

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 ?

[rpedde]

@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.

[stretch]

Infrant (can’t bring myself to use the new name) are working on releasing an SDK for the firmware running on the ReadyNAS.
The V4 firmware, unlike earlier versions, allows root access.
And to top it all off, Firefly is preloaded so all you have to do is turn it on.

The downside:

It’s a custom build of Firefly
They’ve got some bugs in the V4 firmware so it’s been placed on hold
The ReadyNAS costs a lot more than a slug
Transcoding is disabled 😥

Edit: V4 firmware on the ReadyNAS ships with Firefly svn-1676 but includes some fixes from svn-1696

[rpedde]

@stretch wrote:

Infrant (can’t bring myself to use the new name) are working on releasing an SDK for the firmware running on the ReadyNAS.
The V4 firmware, unlike earlier versions, allows root access.
And to top it all off, Firefly is preloaded so all you have to do is turn it on.

The downside:

It’s a custom build of Firefly
They’ve got some bugs in the V4 firmware so it’s been placed on hold
The ReadyNAS costs a lot more than a slug
Transcoding is disabled 😥

The wd world whatever does come with a full compiler toolchain preloaded, so that’s something.

[mas]

I think the

synology DS107+ 128 mbyte

may be something for you. If not the only working solution.
It is significantly faster than the NSLU with 4x the memory and a faster CPU.

Synology provides a patch to open telnet access so one can hack it in principle and it comes with a working iTunes and UPnP server built in.

I know someone who uses such a machine for video streaming. It is fast enough for this unlike the NSLU.

The downsides are of course also there:
– Its 3-4x the price of a NSLU. Quite a bit overpriced IMHO.
– The Marvell 5281/500 processor is not much know yet in hacked NAS systems – lack of precompiled stuff likely
– Theres certainly much less known as how to customize such a box yet. But alas, there is no community as developed as the NSLU community at all. Probably someone has to start. And as the telnet is open it must be possible somehow hehe.

[fizze]

@mas wrote:

I know someone who uses such a machine for video streaming. It is fast enough for this unlike the NSLU.

On contraire, mon frère.
I use a NSLU2 for video streaming, amongst other things. I have hooked it up to a WRT54g that serves as a wireless bridge, and thus serves videos in all different flavours to my Pinnacle Showcenter.
Starting from MPEG1 in 320×200 to Xvid and Divx in Full-HD this all works very well.
The bottleneck here is in fact the Showcenter’s network chipset, not the NSLU2. Note that even a full-HD mpeg2 encoded video requires roughly 20-30Mbps. That translates to 2-4Mbyte/sec, which is clearly in the working range for the slug. 😉

[Anonymous]

I have a large library (17,000+ FLAC songs) that I serve to 3 soundbridges in my home using Firefly Media Server. I started out using an unslung slug, but the performance wasn’t acceptable. I should qualify that – the time it took to serve up the list of artists was unacceptably slow (20 seconds or so). Once the artist list was presented, performance was quite good (after I added an index on artists/albums onto songs.db). My second venture into NAS was on a Linkstation Pro. Hacking the Linkstation Pro and installing Firefly was quite easy (Linux noob, here) and performance was much, much better (6 seconds). I also like the fact that everything is in one easy to access box on the Linkstation.

For my particular needs, my vote goes with LinkStation Pro. It’s fast, quiet and easy to maintain.

[midi]

Thanks !

The Synology is really interesting. But I am afraid that I could not unterstand the telnet installation of firefly.

The Helios Z1000 seems to be an nice device. Supposedly it based on Infrant NAS design and Helios wants to open the system for telnet with one of the next firmware updates. Then it would perhaps easy to install firefly.

@fizze:

I am also interested to stream video files with my D-Box II by using my NSLU. I think therefore it is necessary to install a second package on my NSLU (beside the mtdaap). Is it possible to install a second package without destroying the first mtdaap nightly ?

[mas]

I know that is is possible to stream videos with the NSLUs. But its tight and strictly depends on

1) That nothing else is using the NSLU currently. Not much reserves.

2) Thats its rather highly compressed videos. Streaming HDs doesnt work. i tried it.

The synology has an advantage there. No doubt. At the costs that I mentioned. They are just starting to fully hack these newer synologies. A crosscompile toolchain seems to exist but is rather new.

[Author]

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