What am I missing here...

1. offizieller Beitrag

    I don't have a problem, just kind of a question about something I don't get.


    I've been watching a lot of Youtube videos lately learning how to do things in OMV and I've run across a lot of videos talking about building a home NAS. Most of them talk about needing 16gb of RAM and Xeon processors and other higher end equipment to properly transcode videos in Plex to your home devices. I don't get it. My test system was a Core 2 Duo cpu and my new server has only an i5-4400 cpu. Both systems only have 8gb of RAM. I tested both systems streaming 3 different .mkv movies to three different tv's around the house at the same time with two of the TV's connected to the server via wifi and none of them stuttered, buffered or had any issues. I even checked my CPU usage during these tests and while the Core 2 Duo was up in the 70-80% at times ranscoding three movies at once, neither of them max'd out or came close to maxing out. The i5 didn't even break the 30% mark.


    So what am I missing that these people who most likely know a ton more than I do about this stuff suggest you need these massive systems to transcode with. Do they help with better stream quality because the movies all looked perfect to my eyes when I compared them to how they look running thru a Blu-Ray player. I haven't tested a remote stream yet, so would that be where the extra transcode power is needed?


    Just curious because I naturally like to understand things that don't make sense to me...

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    You're missing the fact they have more money than sense.


    I don't do a lot of transcoding, but I would probably consider an i3 to be minimum. My Celeron can pull it off, although it will stutter a bit at times and the CPU goes to 75-80ish.


    I think you need to trust your own testing (ie, an i5 is fine) rather than what some gear geek on Youtube is saying.


    That's just my purely uneducated opinion, as I don't have to transcode.

    I certainly don't plan to change anything based on those videos and I trust what my own experiments showed me, but I just didn't understand why they were saying what they were saying and thought maybe I didn't understand the whole concept of transcoding a video. My understanding was it was when plex has to convert say an .mkv file to another format for streaming. I wasn't seeing any problem with doing it on my old equipment so I thought maybe my thinking was wrong. It's a shame that people with less knowledge will see those videos and buy into what they are saying and spend way more money then they have to when it can be done on older hardware.


    In reading the Plex website, they do say that transcoding doesn't typically occur when used locally so I guess the power is really needed for remote streaming so maybe that's what the guys in those videos are referring to.

    • Offizieller Beitrag
    Zitat von flyinjoe13

    I certainly don't plan to change anything based on those videos and I trust what my own experiments showed me, but I just didn't understand why they were saying what they were saying and thought maybe I didn't understand the whole concept of transcoding a video. My understanding was it was when plex has to convert say an .mkv file to another format for streaming. I wasn't seeing any problem with doing it on my old equipment so I thought maybe my thinking was wrong. It's a shame that people with less knowledge will see those videos and buy into what they are saying and spend way more money then they have to when it can be done on older hardware.


    In reading the Plex website, they do say that transcoding doesn't typically occur when used locally so I guess the power is really needed for remote streaming so maybe that's what the guys in those videos are referring to.


    That's a good possibility... I'm getting ready to build another oDroid HC2 and put OMV on it. I've got one at my parents that is my offsite backup... this one I'm going to put at my sisters then I'm going to sync my movie/TV collection for her, then set up a simple smb share to Kodi on their android tv box. Total cost in that will be less than $200 when you count the device, case, sdcard, and a 4tb hard drive (probably just go w/ a WD Blue).. and will PROBABLY be less of a headache than trying to transcode, etc.. over the Internet (definitely w/ my Celeron). I've tested streaming locally from an HC2, and it works fine.


    I'm not sure how much all that crazy hardware costs.. but I feel pretty confident it's way over $200..


    Again, I've always freely admitted I am a simpleton, so this is my purely uneducated opinion on this.

    Zitat von flyinjoe13

    Most of them talk about needing 16gb of RAM

    Most of those people need to visit https://www.linuxatemyram.com (multiple times).


    Just had this two days ago with a colleague responsible for web servers living as VMs on a hosted server with 128GB. He thought he would need those 128GB since almost all the RAM is actually used. But a quick look after emptying the page cache on all VMs revealed that we're fine with less than 16GB.


    As for transcoding users ignore that there exists HW acceleration and even such 'underpowered' and inexpensive 'toys' like an ODROID HC2 can do video transcoding on their video engine without using the CPU cores that much: Helios - HC2 - Or Microserver?

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