Serviio

OK, thinking out loud:

My NAS (synology 1812) is not powerful enough to transcode to 1080p. (2.3Ghz dualcore intel Atom (*) ).
However, I do have my desktop PC in the next room which can be Wake-On-Lan'ed

Is it possible, or would it be conceivable to set up the scenario:

If transcoding is necessary, WOL the desktop, then somehow pull the data from it? Obviously I could make it be an UPNP server (in my specific case I might prefer ps3media server because it handles DTS better), or perhaps some more direct way of just running a remote instance of FFMPEG or something..

This would be nerd wizardry to the highest level, and must be cool to see working.

<play>
<"loading" video displayed> (to keep the upnp client happy, and not timed out while the transcoder machine boots)
<workstation goes "beep" and starts up>
<video starts playing>

(*) honestly, I actually think the D2700 atom should be powerful enough to encode 1080p MPEG2 "lowlowlowcompression, high bitrate" realtime.. it's a matter of tuning settings.. but OK, for the sake of argument let's say it's not.

It would probably be cheaper and easier for you to buy a bluray player with comprehensive enough format support that your NAS wouldn't need to transcode any video.

I've actually been researching this. It's difficult to find a good answer on which device to get, if any. So far the WD TV or the Xtreamer sidewinder 3 seem to be most comprehensive (and could even do serviio's job of finding metadata) but it's yet another box, and I was very happy having my playstation handle most of the streaming.

If you have a PS3 then that should play most stuff without transcoding, no? What's missing in particular?

the PS3 doesn't support the highest-end (within reason) x264 levels/profiles. It's reasonably good at dealing with higher bitrate spikes than "L4.1" (officially supported) but when it comes to advanced decompression routines it doesn't handle quite a few fairly common methods.

Effectively, a non-negligible amount of video files I run across fail.

Slightly more specifically, Serviio tries to recode quite a few files and then fails because they are 1080p