Excellent points. For my particular use-case scenario, x264 for 1080p works best for the users my library is shared with. I recently overhauled my library to get as much 1080p content into x264 as I could, and my friends have noticed a significant improvement in performance. I still have 4k content, but it’s mostly for me since my personal setup supports it. Since my NAS isn’t having to transcode literally everything now, it’s no issue if it needs to transcode a few 4k streams for my remote users.

I’m running a DS918+, so certainly not the newest model, but it’s still trucking. I was thinking about upgrading to a newer chassis model, but I see the newer ones have moved to AMD processors that don’t support hardware transcoding. Go figure.