Serviio

It would be great to have the A5 equipped iPhone/iPad doing the transcoding job while the pc is turned off without consuming amps and amps of current

If you mean what I think you mean - run the server part of serviio on the iPhone/iPad to stream media from the iPhone/iPad, the answer will probably be no as that would be a very significant task.

Zip does however want client apps (that act as the serviio console) written so hopefully somebody can write an iOS app now that i've done an android app.

I think the low cost way of running Serviio 24/7 is on a NAS, low heat and little power consumption

Absolutely right The problem is that a NAS is usually equipped with very low performing processors, maybe one of the grandpas of the ARM mounted on the recent Apple devices. And a PC, that should have no problem in transcoding, draws a lot of energy out of the net plug, while an iPhone/iPad is much less demandng...

QNAP now use the latest Intel chips

Faster than most PCs if you go for the top model, pair it with a few hard drive and Serviio - you got the best media server ever!

Wheather you go for QNAP or Synology, most NAS forums provide Serviio package to install like an iPhone app, so no messing with compiling ffmpeg etc

ehmm... have you ever had a look at the price of that QNAP device??

2695$!!!

Problems:
- The GPU part of the A5 is not accessible to developers, thus playback is about all you can do. (already a bunch of DLNA players out there) not fast enough to transcode (decode and encode on the fly)
- serviio is written in java, and calls ffmpeg to do the trans coding... Apple only allows apps written in Objective C which does allow C libraries (ffmpeg), but java works differently (serviio needs a Java VM)