Building a NAS + Plex server

[NelizMastr]

3 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Again, I am kinda shocked with how many people in this scene think that consumer grade video consumes a tremendous amount of network resources.

 

For reference, the maximum bitrate on a Blu-Ray disc is 54mbps and a UHD Blu-Ray disc is 128mbps.  And those are, for sure, your 'worst case scenario' bit rates.  So on a 1000mbps LAN, you will have no problem running 6, maybe 7, maximum bitrate UHD Blu-Ray streams.  So your piddly Plex 1080p transcoded streams?  Yeah, NOT gonna be a problem.  Even a 100mbps LAN would PROBABLY be okay since with Plex you're usually looking at more like 10-30mbps.  

 

Think about it this way guys: Movies, in their highest quality available to consumers, are stored on optical discs and optical discs are very, very slow. (Relatively speaking)

The network bandwidth isn't the issue. Transcoding the stream is what bogs down most low power solutions. No hardware transcoding support for certain codecs is what really kills the performance, so that should have the focus: choosing the right CPU/GPU/SOC. Gigabit ethernet is a given these days.

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

The network bandwidth isn't the issue. Transcoding the stream is what bogs down most low power solutions. No hardware transcoding support for certain codecs is what really kills the performance, so that should have the focus: choosing the right CPU/GPU/SOC. Gigabit ethernet is a given these days.

For sure, what you are decoding from and encoding to has a huge influence.

 

...And this is why my HTPCs just have big fat Intel CPUs in them.  They just read off SMB shares and decode everything themselves, including 4K HEVC.

[Bugses]

So should I pick a Intel CPU instead, so I can use hardware transcoding? 

[NelizMastr]

12 hours ago, Bugses said:

So should I pick a Intel CPU instead, so I can use hardware transcoding? 

Or a current gen AMD APU, but yeah, a Kaby Lake Pentium G series or i3 would be the best option.

[voyager_]

On 1/24/2018 at 1:56 PM, Bugses said:

So should I pick a Intel CPU instead, so I can use hardware transcoding? 

An Intel CPU is not required. I have an 8320e underclocked from 3.2 to 3 and it has zero problems handling multiple 1080p streams or a 4k stream. Nearly all my video sources are full blue-ray rips (29-34Gb). We regularly stream from it remotely and have no noticeable delay due to transcoding. The FX platform is older but you can often get a good deal on the older hardware.