h0m3r Posted January 23, 2012 Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 I just setup a QNAP NAS at my place this weekend. Ordered one of these from newegg and a 3TB Seagate barracuda. I still have one open HD slot for later expansion or RAID. Getting the thing running takes probably 45minutes, including HD install, etc. This thing has a lot of cool things you can also setup. QNAP also provides a DynDNS like service for free that you can setup in like 2 clicks and you get a domain at *.mycloudnas.com, *.qcloudnas.com, or *.myqnapnas.com. It has all the cool features that most NAS seem to have now: S/FTP Web Server UPnP Media Server SSH/Telnet BitTorrent manager (which is really easy to use and quite nice) and some other stuff. Installing community apps is simple with QPKG. I installed Python and pyLoad on the QNAP in a couple minutes. pyLoad lets you paste in a bunch of rapidshare/megaupload/tons of other links and it will autodownload them. So far I've been able to stream video to everything I've tried. Xbox360 (with some tricks), PC, iPod. The only real drawback I've found so far: Transcoding QNAP uses Twonky Media Server for the UPnP bit, and transcoding high quality video is virtually impossible on this little ARM CPU. The problem is, Xbox360 doesn't support MKV, so watching this format requires transcoding. For this, I just run Tversity on my Windows box, add the NAS media folder to the Tversity library, and then stream from the PC to Xbox. Kind of shitty in design, but works flawlessly. To get subtitles to show on Xbox after transcoding, open ffdshow video config, check "Subtitles", "Accept embedded subtitles", Accept SSA, ASS and ASS2 subtitles (experimental)", and "Decode closed captions". Make sure "ass" is in the Extensions priority box. Overall this thing is the shit and I wish I had it a long time ago. Link to comment
nick Posted January 23, 2012 Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 Baller homie. I wondered how/if you got subs working. Life without NAS would be fairly difficult now. I can't really expand mine more now so I'll be needing to build or buy another one soon. Don't think I can be bothered to build another one. Might grab a couple of these. dl ALL THE ANIME. ^_^' And oh shit son pyLoad has a Windows build. :o Link to comment
h0m3r Posted January 23, 2012 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 Python apps work very well on Windows, despite it generally being used in a *nix context. :) Great language... writing cross platform stuff is pretty simple. h3h3 PS: pyLoad can't do reCaptchas... or is it that CaptchaTrader can't do reCaptcha? Either way, if a site has reCaptcha it will prompt you to input the captcha when the time is right. Link to comment
Philip Posted January 23, 2012 Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 I have a completely different storage system. The QNAP system shown doesn't interest me too much as many of the features I'd find redundant. Being able to download files and turn your computer off is great in theory--it can potentially reduce electricity bills. In reality, I would find myself having the NAS powered on in addition to my computer--I'd probably not gain much from that. I'm not too knowledgeable about these things, so perhaps there's something glaringly obvious that I've overlooked, but I'm happy with the system I have. I use a toaster device that sits by my computer, it is just a simple USB HDD reader. My camera files in TIFF are about 90MB each picture; so it's nice to have a lot of storage space. The toaster holds two drives, thus one can be used for back up purposes. I confess that I am lazy/too cheap to buy drives, so if one drive dies it will probably hit me quite hard. In regards to media playback, I just have another computer that isn't inside the house. Attached to the computer is an HDMI device. This is quite simply, two boxes with two ethernet wires in-between. These wires go through the walls and to the television in the main room. Link to comment
Pic0o Posted January 23, 2012 Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 Word to the gear man. I have one on my someday list too, since frankenboxen is getting a bit too much. I also lightly dabbled in python a bit ago and liked what was going down. Link to comment
nick Posted January 23, 2012 Report Share Posted January 23, 2012 Python apps work very well on Windows, despite it generally being used in a *nix context. :) Great language... writing cross platform stuff is pretty simple. h3h3 PS: pyLoad can't do reCaptchas... or is it that CaptchaTrader can't do reCaptcha? Either way, if a site has reCaptcha it will prompt you to input the captcha when the time is right. I don't think xkcd will ever be the same again; I keep trying to read the damn thing backwards, real terror. Surprised that service isn't working with recaptcha. Link to comment
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