Synology America Corp. has announced its first media-centric DiskStation, the DS214play. The play is the first DiskStation to launch with dedicated hardware acceleration, specifically for video transcoding.

The DS214play can stream multiple 1080p video codecs, and is still able to handle a variety of additional processor-heavy tasks, according to Thadd Weil, public relations manager at Synology. It has a 1.6GHz dual-core CPU with integrated floating-point unit (FPU).

At the core of the DS214play is Synology’s DiskStation Manager 4.3. With DSM, users have access to a range of utilities, applications, and multimedia packages.

The Synology DS214play is now shipping globally, and will be available in the United States over the next few weeks. It has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of US$369.99. Go to www.synology.com for more info.