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Plex server suggestions


Darkshadow6400

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Hey guys, I'm currently looking at setting up a Plex server for my household. It will be serving media to two chromecasts and one Samsung Smart TV.

From my research so far, a RPi 3 would almost suit my needs except for one issue; some of my media is x265, which the chromecasts can't decode, so some transcoding is required. 

 

From what I have read, transcoding on the RPi 3 is a bit hit and miss. Some people are having good results, others not so much.

 

Does anyone have any experience with them, or other suggestions? Ideally I'd want something with a low power consumption, which is what drove me towards the Pi in the first place.

 

I would most likely be storing all my media in one of these enclosures attached to the Pi:

https://www.pccasegear.com/products/23687/hotway-h82-su3s2-8-bay-usb-3-0-non-raid-enclosure

 

 

Another option I have found could be building my own NAS using something like this, but I wouldn't have any idea what kind of specs would be needed for my particular use case:

https://www.pccasegear.com/products/26841/silverstone-ds380-8-bay-nas-chassis-usb-3-0

 

 

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I run my plex server on a custom box running FreeNAS, so I don't have any experience with Plex on low-power devices. I will say the RPi will probably start buffering hard if you need to transcode multiple high bitrate 1080p streams at once and send them out. You might be okay with it if you're only doing 1-2 streams or not transcoding as often. I usually prefer RPis as the frontend server instead, since they're powerful enough to load some nice looking media portal frontends (PHT, Kodi, etc) with smooth animations and hardware decoding of x264 at least. (x264 10bit and 265 will have issues). 

 

since roughly half of my media is now in hi10p, though, RPi stopped being a solution a while back, and I switched to an Intel NUC for the frontend, which is powerful enough to decode both at software and still stay pretty silent and low power. 

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1 hour ago, Catar said:

I run my plex server on a custom box running FreeNAS, so I don't have any experience with Plex on low-power devices. I will say the RPi will probably start buffering hard if you need to transcode multiple high bitrate 1080p streams at once and send them out. You might be okay with it if you're only doing 1-2 streams or not transcoding as often. I usually prefer RPis as the frontend server instead, since they're powerful enough to load some nice looking media portal frontends (PHT, Kodi, etc) with smooth animations and hardware decoding of x264 at least. (x264 10bit and 265 will have issues). 

 

since roughly half of my media is now in hi10p, though, RPi stopped being a solution a while back, and I switched to an Intel NUC for the frontend, which is powerful enough to decode both at software and still stay pretty silent and low power. 

Thanks for the input. I was thinking of going the opposite route to you and potentially using a NUC as the backend server, granted it's powerful enough to transcode to 2 devices at a time if needed and not chew through too much power when in standby. 

 

Most of the time it will just be regular 8bit x264 content streamed to the chromecasts, so transcoding won't be needed often, which is why I was hoping to be able to go the low power route for the server. 

 

My family have only just gotten used to using the Chromecast, so to have to stick another device in front of them and teach them how to use it is something I'd rather not have to do :P

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Just now, Darkshadow6400 said:

Thanks for the input. I was thinking of going the opposite route to you and potentially using a NUC as the backend server, granted it's powerful enough to transcode to 2 devices at a time if needed and not chew through too much power when in standby. 

 

Most of the time it will just be regular 8bit x264 content streamed to the chromecasts, so transcoding won't be needed often, which is why I was hoping to be able to go the low power route for the server. 

 

My family have only just gotten used to using the Chromecast, so to have to stick another device in front of them and teach them how to use it is something I'd rather not have to do :P

the NUC can definitely handle it, though the fan may kick up with multiple transcodes going, and at least on my model the fan is quite loud at default settings. If you've got it near the viewing area, I'd fiddle with the settings or consider changing out the cooling for something quieter. 

 

My setup is only needed because of the sheer amount of 10bit media I have, which is never going to have hardware decoding available, so will always be transcoded to everything ;-;

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1 hour ago, Catar said:

the NUC can definitely handle it, though the fan may kick up with multiple transcodes going, and at least on my model the fan is quite loud at default settings. If you've got it near the viewing area, I'd fiddle with the settings or consider changing out the cooling for something quieter. 

 

My setup is only needed because of the sheer amount of 10bit media I have, which is never going to have hardware decoding available, so will always be transcoded to everything ;-;

Ideally I'll pop it away somewhere out of sight, since it's just going to be a headless unit serving media around the house.

 

With more and more x265 stuff coming out and my crappy bandwidth, I'd definitely opt for the smaller releases of regular TV shows, since my family aren't quite as quality obsessed as us folk here and they're happy with anything I serve them. Which means I need a server that'll transcode x265 with little effort, since I'm not going to upgrade them all to Chromecast Ultras yet.

 

Perhaps a NUC, or custom build might be the way for my to go then. Just gotta find a nice low power solution.

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2 hours ago, Catar said:

the NUC can definitely handle it, though the fan may kick up with multiple transcodes going, and at least on my model the fan is quite loud at default settings.

Depending and the audio device, i.e. external speakers or headphones, I doubt you would actually hear the fan over the audio playback. Also what model do you have? The newer ones are nearly silent. 

 

1 hour ago, Darkshadow6400 said:

Perhaps a NUC, or custom build might be the way for my to go then. Just gotta find a nice low power solution.

i5, 4 or 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD m.2 with a 2TB 2.5" internal... sorted! Compact, quiet and yea, very low on power consumption. 

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Just now, Moodkiller said:

Depending and the audio device, i.e. external speakers or headphones, I doubt you would actually hear the fan over the audio playback. Also what model do you have? The newer ones are nearly silent. 

He's doing a setup for a household, so I presume it'd be with speakers and a TV. under such a setup, assuming you're trying to build the best home theatre setup you can, any noise reduction is always an improvement, since you can't assume a constant noise level to drown out the fan.

 

The NUC I have that actually gets the fan kicking up is a 5i5RYK, and it's pretty much silent at all times as you say, but under specific conditions (4K rendering of certain parts of my Kodi GUI, which aren't very well optimized because I'm lazy), you can definitely hear the fan kick up to full speed while browsing the library. Never hear it during video output though, even at 4K Hi10p.

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4 minutes ago, Catar said:

you can definitely hear the fan kick up to full speed while browsing the library. Never hear it during video output though, even at 4K Hi10p.

So for the most part, it won't be a problem. I wouldn't have problem if it was making all the noise before hand, but yeah, good to know. Not distracting during playback. 

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Just now, Moodkiller said:

So for the most part, it won't be a problem. I wouldn't have problem if it was making all the noise before hand, but yeah, good to know. Not distracting during playback. 

quite. I'm just obsessive and enjoy browsing my stupidly large library a lot, so I like the fan to be quiet while I do =P

 

during video playback, except in extremely rare cases (some absurd bitrate non-DXVA and stupid encoding settings), you might hear it again, but probably never.

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6 minutes ago, Catar said:

quite. I'm just obsessive and enjoy browsing my stupidly large library a lot, so I like the fan to be quiet while I do =P

=] lol. 

 

6 minutes ago, Catar said:

during video playback, except in extremely rare cases (some absurd bitrate non-DXVA and stupid encoding settings), you might hear it again, but probably never.

I've got an RPi B+ at home atm (was my previous seedbox - LOL). Im tempted to maybe see how that goes before splashing out on a nuc as a media center. As you said, it may be sluggish but, you know, 720p archiving over here... 

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2 minutes ago, Moodkiller said:

=] lol. 

 

I've got an RPi B+ at home atm (was my previous seedbox - LOL). Im tempted to maybe see how that goes before splashing out on a nuc as a media center. As you said, it may be sluggish but, you know, 720p archiving over here... 

Doesn't matter on 720p vs 1080p, my B+ fell apart at any 10bit. The RPi relies heavily on the hardware decoder to do anything nice media-wise, and since there's no hardware decoding of Hi10p, if you're watching any 10bit you'll have to switch to software decoding. Give it a shot just in case, but don't expect much. You can try overclocking it though; I know some people have gotten good results that way. 

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7 minutes ago, Catar said:

Doesn't matter on 720p vs 1080p, my B+ fell apart at any 10bit. The RPi relies heavily on the hardware decoder to do anything nice media-wise, and since there's no hardware decoding of Hi10p, if you're watching any 10bit you'll have to switch to software decoding. Give it a shot just in case, but don't expect much. You can try overclocking it though; I know some people have gotten good results that way. 

Definitely will give it a go... but yeah, won't be expecting great things. Lol, sounds about right. It can be a sacrifice. 

 

7 minutes ago, Darkshadow6400 said:

Thanks guys. I've got lots of ideas now. Definitely got a few places to start with.

Heh, not too sure if I helped after going off on my own tangent there, but you are welcome. 

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Hostname: nuku OS: Linux 3.13.0-106-generic/x86_64 Distro: Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS CPU: 48 x AMD Opteron 6172 (2100.000 MHz) Processes: 715 Uptime: 22m Load Average: 0.19 Memory Usage: 2.93GB/31.23GB (9.40%) Disk Usage: 64.30TB/88.37TB (72.76%) Network Traffic (eth0): 0.00TB In/0.00TB Out

 

new-nuku-v6.jpg

 

 

Edited by SakuraChan
hardware upgrades complete, thats just 1 Massive Server
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