Plex Media Server

Before installing any update, ask yourself if you actually need to. Media servers are designed to stream media to client devices, so if everything is working and you’re not looking for new features, there might not be a reason to update. If you’re exposing Plex outside of your local network, you have more of a reason to keep it updated for potential security fixes. But if you’re only using it for local network streaming, you can introduce new bugs that you weren’t experiencing before, so updating “just because” isn’t always the right call.

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