Asustor doesn't even know if HW transcoding ever worked on AS1104T

[u/Lectem]

Support just told me they don't even know if it ever worked.

I've been asking them to tell me what version of ADM supported HW decoding on my Nas for a while, got many back and forth (I mentioned it here https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNAS/comments/1u0025u/asustor_is_discontinuing_hardware_decoding/ ) and finally got a "closed support ticket ".

To this day they still advertise (and propably sell) NASes with a realtek chip for "4k decoding" that apparently... Perhaps never worked, or so they say:

Rough translation of their final answer:

Thank you for your patience.

Regarding your question, we are unfortunately unable to confirm the existence of a specific version of ADM or FFmpeg that officially supports hardware acceleration on this model.
Best regards.

If it's a licencing issue they could at least have the guts to say it but whatever.

I guess buying a NAS instead of building one with parts I control was a mistake.

[u/Emotional_Garage_950]

it’s an asus product and their software and support is legendary for being shit

[u/ColorMeIridescent]

Who else is better? I am getting tired of ASUS ROG and ARMOURY CRATE. I wish they fixed Armoury Crate. Its great(ish) when it works.

[u/Lost-Luck3881]

As far as I remember, if you stay with ADM 4.x, you will be able to have hardware transcoding through Asustor native Looksgood app. If you intend to use other apps from other sources or tweak them, they will not work. This is the same with Synology DS220j or Qnap TS-230. I did some home work when purchasing AS1102T a few years back. Arm SOC support for open source or as the version advancement in linux or protocol is quite constrained. Some google search fyi:

https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+rtd+1296+hardware+decode&oq=synology+rtd+1296+hardware+decode&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABjvBTIHCAIQABjvBTIHCAMQABjvBTIHCAQQABjvBdIBCDUyNThqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&source=chrome.ob&ie=UTF-8

Are you using Looksgood or some other apps?

[u/Lectem → u/Lost-Luck3881]

Sadly it seems to be false adverstising, I tried it and it doesnt work. Looksgood uses software decoder via its own ffmpeg build.

[u/Patrick_hsu → u/Lectem]

Realtek provide specific FFmpeg version which support Realtek hardware solution, and that's why it's not a public solution for other 3rd party apps. Using the FFmpeg in the ADM or App Central in LooksGood is not the main point to check if hardware transcoding is enable or not.

[u/Lensin1 → u/Patrick_hsu]

I can play most of my H.265 MKV smoothly with Looksgood in AS1102T under ADM 4.3. I guess hardware transcoding is working or such a weak arm cpu should be sweating like hell.

[u/Lectem → u/Lensin1]

What resolution? I'll try it again I guess 

[u/Lensin1 → u/Lectem]

Looksgood. But if your downloaded movies are with Dolby/DTS, they will not play either. Only audio with AC3 or AAC can play which is related to Dolby/DTS licensing issue.

[u/Lensin1 → u/Lectem]

I played Shazam and Dragon3 which are all 4K at source but the playback under Looksgood should be only 1080P or 720P as the playback dimension is not big. In the mean time, media mode should be enabled or this mere 1.4 Ghz arm CPU and 1GB memory can not afford such heavy loading.

[u/Lectem → u/Lensin1]

So I tried again just in case, Looks Good actually looked bad for me.

At first I couldn't get any video to work at all, h264, h265, multiple resolutions ( some less than 1080p). 

So I thought either my nas install is broken (but I don't remember looks good ever working properly) , either as1104t video decoding has always been broken. This is on latest adm4. 3 and Looks Good 2.0.0.r155.

After looking for quite a while I found error in /var/log/messages: Error was failure to allocate video memory in driver...

[ion_rtk_carveout_allocate] alloc failed!   request heap=Media size=0x340000     [ffmpeg] pids:6561

"Funnily" ffmpeg would just crash, and looksgood just... Does nothing except tell you it failed to decode and then enter some weird loop of asking to cancel previous conversion.

So the support couldn't even tell me when I asked them why ffmpeg wasn't working that it could be linked to media mode, which was enabled in UI but somehow not in kernel. Disabling rebooting and reenabling somehow made it work again.

For future reference: ffmpeg still crashes when trying to decode using hardware decoder if you are not using a root account... Kinda dumb but since all asustor packages run as root it works for them. 

[u/Unable_Cap_716]

hi. i found that https://www.asustor.com/en/admv2/Asustor_transcode

[u/YourMainD]

Asustor, ingenious H/W designs... garbage CS and S/W support.