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There are many options on the market for home security surveillance. Most are exclusive: once you’ve picked a vendor, you’re stuck with it. And the idea of mixing hardware from different vendors is where Synology Surveillance Station comes into play—and it plays well. In short, this app is a standard network video recorder (NVR) designed to host IP cams of your choosing, offering lots of potential. Among other things, you can choose different types of cams for different environments and situations—indoors, outdoors, Wi-Fi, PoE, wall-mount, ceiling-mount, etc. And there are thousands of support

The decision really comes down to hardware transcoding. The Plex package on a Synology NAS does not support hardware transcoding, which means if you’re streaming media that needs to be transcoded (different format, lower quality for bandwidth, etc.), the CPU has to do all of the work. On most Plus series devices, that’s fine for one or two streams. Beyond that, you’ll start to see buffering or quality drops. Docker is the only way to get hardware transcoding working on a Synology NAS, and it only works on devices with an Intel CPU that supports QuickSync. Any Ryzen-based Synology will not supp