BBC HLS streams outside the UK

[Cebolla]

Paul

If the QNAP NAS is struggling because it's doing the extra AAC to L16 transcoding (which requires the external convertor to be used by MinimStreamer, so using ffmpeg in your case), you still have the simpler (& less burden on NAS's resources) option of just using the AAC stream extracted by Minimstreamer from the BBC HLS source (& so no need for the *:L16 transcoding option nor ffmpeg) for the N-50.

As I mentioned above, the N-50 requires the AAC stream type to be set in the stream information for each of the BBC HLS streams in the BBC radio.m3u file,
eg:
#EXTINF:-1,[*R3] BBC Radio 3
becomes:
#EXTINF:-1,[*R3;aac] BBC Radio 3

You could also add the 48000 sample rate for completeness, though I haven't found an issue with N-50 one way or the other so long as the 'aac' is still there. So using the above example:
#EXTINF:-1,[*R3;aac,48000] BBC Radio 3

BTW, are you using the *:L16 transcoding option for streams other than the BBC HLS ones?