What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?
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@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
@wirestyle22 No, meaning I wanted all transcoding to happen on the SSDs. Had I installed the VM on the R510, I would have had the VM's vhdx on rotating platters in RAID6 so I didn't want that to get in the way of potentially resource intensive activity like transcoding. By placing the VM on the host with the SSD array, I'm leveraging that additional speed without worrying about transcoding running into some bottleneck.
That's an interesting solution to that problem
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@wirestyle22 I even tossed around the idea of setting up a ramdisk on that host and use the ramdisk mapped to the Ubuntu VM to handle transcoding. I knew I might run into problems based on the x265 transcoding and the number of concurrent clients. But so far, that hasn't been necessary.
By comparison, I had a similar setup but running on a windows VM and it wouldn't transcode anything beyond 2 streams without a 40GB ramdisk. It would stutter all over the place.
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@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
@wirestyle22 I even tossed around the idea of setting up a ramdisk on that host and use the ramdisk mapped to the Ubuntu VM to handle transcoding. I knew I might run into problems based on the x265 transcoding and the number of concurrent clients. But so far, that hasn't been necessary.
By comparison, I had a similar setup but running on a windows VM and it wouldn't transcode anything beyond 2 streams without a 40GB ramdisk. It would stutter all over the place.
What about SSD Caching?
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@wirestyle22 The problem is that while transcoding, the CPU is working hard to stay ahead of the stream. So it wasn't a data access problem. Even the x265 encodes run around 35-45Mbps at most and that's easily accomplished just readin the data from the R510 as it's simply acting as network storage. But the Linux VM does the brunt of the work after that as it converts the media stream into a usable format for the player. For most setups, using standard disks would probably work fine. But throw in multiple x265 and x264 conversions and your VM will crap all over itself if it doesn't have fast media to write to...it won't be able to stay ahead of the playback streams.
Edit: fixed spelling
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@NashBrydges That's actually the reason I try to stick to native formats. No transcoding means very little overhead
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@wirestyle22 That works well if you can control your playback devices. I didn't have that luxury. So transcoding is a necessity. Even if I want to stream to my laptop while on layover or at a hotel, transcode is necessary. I could store multiple versions of the files but I've already got many many TBs or mkv containers at x264 and x265. Don't have the space for all the potential versions that natively play on so many players.
I have 4k TVs at home but my brother in law doesn't so if he is watching the same movie I am, it can play natively via Roku 4 for me but it can't for him.
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@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
@wirestyle22 That works well if you can control your playback devices. I didn't have that luxury. So transcoding is a necessity. Even if I want to stream to my laptop while on layover or at a hotel, transcode is necessary. I could store multiple versions of the files but I've already got many many TBs or mkv containers at x264 and x265. Don't have the space for all the potential versions that natively play on so many players.
I have 4k TVs at home but my brother in law doesn't so if he is watching the same movie I am, it can play natively via Roku 4 for me but it can't for him.
Basically what I did was just buy a Roku 3 for every person I wanted to share it with. Takes care of a christmas present and I get control
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@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
I have 4k TVs at home but my brother in law doesn't so if he is watching the same movie I am, it can play natively via Roku 4 for me but it can't for him.
Yeah I don't yet but I can see where that would be frustrating
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I have an old 2950 in service running a 2008 server for my file access (primary file storage & print server) with a couple other VMs on the host. One of those other hosts is the Ubuntu Server 14.04 (if I recall correctly) with plex on there, using smb to mount all of my movies and other media. All of my media is on DAS, internal through the perc. As I stated above, I use a roku3 to watch everything. The only problems I have is that the 2950 is underpowered and if a tv show or movie isn't encoded in a ready-to-play format, then I need to prepare to watch that show by telling plex to transcode it for watching in advance. I'm planning to upgrade to a 510 or something as soon as I have a couple grand just doing nothing. Mostly, I just want more storage.
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It seems Roku and Kodi are not really friends.
For the sake of conversation, we should consider them as completely separate things, not links in a chain.Ideally it would be nice to watch anything from any source using a single interface. Right now we have our PS3 which we use for Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and DLNA from Win10.
If I got a Roku, then it would seem Kodi is not the best bet, Plex is where it's at.
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Our Roku 3 works flawlessly with Plex!
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@dafyre said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
Our Roku 3 works flawlessly with Plex!
It's really a fantastic combination.
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I am leaning toward Plex and Roku.
I don't think Roku is actually necessary though, at least right away. I should be able to just plug the tower directly into the TV with an HDMI cable right? Or is Plex only accessible over the network? Even then I can just use the network without Roku.
In any case, assume I go with Plex. Is the Linux install more or less stable and easy to use than the Windows install? It just needs to be easy to manage and easy to add media over a network share or whatever. Local storage.
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@guyinpv You can plug the PC directly into the TV via HDMI (you'll want to make sure your video card also sends sound via the HDMI...not all do) but the noise is very quickly going to become annoying. It's hard to beat the silent Roku. Not to mention the Roku can take some stream and direct play them, relieving the stress from your PC for any transcoding work.
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@guyinpv said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
I am leaning toward Plex and Roku.
I don't think Roku is actually necessary though, at least right away. I should be able to just plug the tower directly into the TV with an HDMI cable right? Or is Plex only accessible over the network? Even then I can just use the network without Roku.
In any case, assume I go with Plex. Is the Linux install more or less stable and easy to use than the Windows install? It just needs to be easy to manage and easy to add media over a network share or whatever. Local storage.
It's not an easier install than Windows but some distros are more annoying than others. I installed in on CentOS 7 and made a guide here which is an okay guide. The problem with CentOS is it partitions anything past the 50GB cap in the
/root/directory into/home/and you need to reallocate the space either to/root/or just point everything to/home/. -
@wirestyle22 said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
The problem with CentOS is it partitions anything past the 50GB cap in the
/root/directory into/home/and you need to reallocate the space either to/root/or just point everything to/home/.That makes it sound far worse than it is. It doesn't just partition like that and you don't need to reallocate space later. You just can't skip the "choose your storage layout" part of the install when you initially install. You can partition however you want, choose your filesystems and so forth from the very beginning. It just has a default that works for people who decide to skip that step.
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@scottalanmiller said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
@wirestyle22 said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
The problem with CentOS is it partitions anything past the 50GB cap in the
/root/directory into/home/and you need to reallocate the space either to/root/or just point everything to/home/.That makes it sound far worse than it is. It doesn't just partition like that and you don't need to reallocate space later. You just can't skip the "choose your storage layout" part of the install when you initially install. You can partition however you want, choose your filesystems and so forth from the very beginning. It just has a default that works for people who decide to skip that step.
Well that is certainly true Scott, but there's nothing in that initial set up that tells you what the fuck it's doing with all the space and how bad is mangling it was that/home.
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I actually only ever used CentOS and assumed it was just a characteristic of all distro's instead of just CentOS alone until a week ago or so
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@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:
@guyinpv You can plug the PC directly into the TV via HDMI (you'll want to make sure your video card also sends sound via the HDMI...not all do) but the noise is very quickly going to become annoying. It's hard to beat the silent Roku. Not to mention the Roku can take some stream and direct play them, relieving the stress from your PC for any transcoding work.
Good point about audio. Is this a requirement? I mean, can't I just run the audio out on the PC over to an audio input jack on the TV? Or is audio-over-HDMI a necessary standard for TVs?
My TV is about 6 or 7 years old plasma 40". It has HDMI and even USB ports but not a "smart" TV by any means.
