Hard drive usage when using NAS

[HoppTop]

Hello,

My mac mini 2014 hard drive is very slow and probably failing. I am planning to use my Raspberry Pi has NAS storage for storing and playing my movies and pictures.

One question I have in my mind is... if i store my movies in my Raspberry Pi and connect to my Mac via SMB.. will there be any activity on my Mac hard drive (which is very slow) ?

For playing my movies will the transcoding happen in my raspberry pi or in the Mac Mini?

Thanks!
 

[Eigenvektor]

8 minutes ago, HoppTop said:

One question I have in my mind is... if i store my movies in my Raspberry Pi and connect to my Mac via SMB.. will there be any activity on my Mac hard drive (which is very slow) ?

And you expect the Pi over network to be faster? In terms of latency and bandwidth, I'd expect it to be slower than a locally attached disk drive. There may still be activity on the local drive, e.g. some caching, swapping etc. but not necessarily directly related to the movie stream.

 

8 minutes ago, HoppTop said:

For playing my movies will the transcoding happen in my raspberry pi or in the Mac Mini?

Since you're using SMB, it'll happen on the Mac. The Pi will transfer that file over network, but your Mac is the one actually rendering it. I'm sure you could do the transcoding on the Pi and then make it stream a video, but that'll probably take more work to set up.

[HoppTop]

Thanks! by installing Plex server on my Pi will it automatically transcode and send only the movie stream to the Mac?

I am bit confused what they say on the plex support on transcoding - https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media/

Any other better protocal than SMB? I will willing to try even its bit harder (Learning = fun)

[Kilrah]

I would not expect a Pi to be able to transcode in real time.

 

Playing on the mac via SMB isn't going to cause any disk usage that wouldn't already happen on the mac.

[Eigenvektor]

12 minutes ago, HoppTop said:

Thanks! by installing Plex server on my Pi will it automatically transcode and send only the movie stream to the Mac?

That's more or less the point of Plex. It'll provide a video stream that you can watch on another device.

 

The point here would be to have a machine that is fast enough to read the file, transcode it and then convert it to a video stream with a (lower) bit rate than the original file, so you can watch it on a machine that isn't fast enough on its own. Or to watch it on a machine that doesn't support the source format. The issue here would be that the Pi probably isn't fast enough to fulfill that role.

 

Quote

Any other better protocal than SMB? I will willing to try even its bit harder (Learning = fun)

There are lots of protocols to access files on a remote machine (AFP, CIFS, SMB, FTP, SFTP, ...) but they're not made with video streams in mind. All of those are geared towards transferring files (just not necessarily fast enough to stream video lag free).

[HoppTop]

@Eigenvektor What about this server Kodi https://kodi.tv/ ... I have never tried it is it similar to Plex which transcodes real time and stream?

[Kilrah]

It's not a server but a viewing client.

[Eigenvektor]

6 minutes ago, HoppTop said:

@Eigenvektor What about this server Kodi https://kodi.tv/ ... I have never tried it is it similar to Plex which transcodes real time and stream?

Plex is primarily geared towards streaming media to a device. Kodi is primarily geared towards receiving streams from other devices (like a Plex media server). However that doesn't solve the actual issue: Is the Pi fast enough to transcode media and then stream it over a network for you to watch that stream on another device lag free?