@dduke2104 said:
@MattWeiler said:
[my own earlier comments snipped]
Never said that there were any zero cost/effort solutions; just some that might work. Anyone who’s already put 64 TB raw (but only 30 TB in use?) into Plex libraries has clearly made a substantial investment and is presumably prepared to make commensurately more to get something of value.
It seems as though you’re happy with PMS in regard to use by local clients today. Your complaint is all around handling remote clients?
20 Mbps upload isn’t the severe bottleneck I thought was being faced though I do know people with just 10 up. It is still rather thin for multiple (how many?) concurrent remote clients some of whom may have unrealistic expectations of what is possible given that constraint. It still seems that a single, high-end PMS server could fill that upload pipe but it wasn’t clear whether that was the actual bottleneck/problem you are trying to deal with. There was no mention of what you might have tried to limit or manage remote client bandwidth utilization given the current transcoding. I didn’t see any response to my point about how simply adding transcoding capacity not seeming able to change that outcome.
There was mention of not wanting to Optimize the entire 30TB library because it wasn’t all going to be watched remotely. Excellent point. Hypothetically, how much would be considered Optimize-worthy? I don’t know anything about the remote clients attempting to be serviced but creating multiple low resolution or low bit-rate copies is likely overkill and of minimal benefit. One smart choice can likely make all the remote users as happy as possible given the 20 Mbps upload constraint. Optimize isn’t perfect but if your actual target is something like a couple of hundred movies then it can certainly be tried on a small-scale first with little effort. I have no comeback on how Optimize “feels”. It either works for you or it doesn’t.
I’m no apologist for Plex Cloud but knowing now that you’d want to push a 30 TB library into the cloud at 20 Mbps makes it less than ideal regardless of the incremental costs of using it.
FWIW, if you’ve already got a pile of unused PCs that could reasonably do transcoding then I understand the perceived simplicity of harnessing them into a farm if the rather sophisticated tools necessary to do it were present. Just the option of a two-node, active/active PMS cluster coupled with iSCSI backend storage creates some very interesting scaling possibilities but not one many of us need unless HW transcoding is a total substantive failure. (Rhetorical question follows: How many of us are in a situation where we’ve retired and retained so many apparently still-useful machines?)
PMS itself is not open-source I so I doubt anyone outside of Plex can get enough insights into it to make distributed transcoding work. Personally, I’m not into waiting indefinitely on Plex to provide additional solutions to a problem I can solve some other way now.
Yes, my PMS is capable of satisfying my local needs but not my remote ones and many other people are in the same boat as myself.
Distributed Transcoding can Solve Bandwidth Issues
Take my internet connection as an example, 20 Mbps up (the down doesn’t matter).
When I rip a Blu-ray, I rip the video at 4096 Kbps at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (obviously the resolution doesn’t matter when it comes to file size).
Now, if I want to remotely play that video via Direct Play from a friends house, that will use approximately 1/5 of my available upload bandwidth; that’s fine, I can do that no problem.
Now, if my brother, my dad, my mother-in-law and 1 of my friends wants to watch a movie from my PMS at the same time (maybe Friday evening after work… it’s a popular time), well now I have a problem. My PMS is uploading at around 20 Mbps. Well, most people’s internet connections are not always going to give a consistent 100% reliable upload speed, so it’ll dip once-and-a-while and people will see buffering.
Now if we put distributed transcoding into the mix, we can say all remote playback must be transcoded to 2048 Kbps (or lower if you like). In my situation, doing this will double the number of concurrent streams available from my PMS.
Optimize Some Content
I don’t like the idea of guessing which content people on my PMS will want to watch, that just feels very kludgy and lazy.
My dad likes westerns, but nobody else on my PMS does, so
Plex Cloud
Again, Plex Cloud is a neat idea, but it doesn’t seem like it’s meant for users with collections larger than a few GBs.
Outside Help
@dduke2104 said:
I doubt anyone outside of Plex can get enough insight into it to make distributed transcoding work.
There is a project on GitHub which has does just what you said likely can’t be done.
github.com/wnielson/Plex-Remote-Transcoder
Complex Issue
I think it’s pretty inappropriate to insinuate that those of use asking for distributed transcoding would perceive it as a simplistic task. Distributing a computer system is not a simplistic task, but it is a very important piece of a well designed architecture.
Those of us who have actually worked on complex distributed computing systems know what it takes and understand that it is a very complex and often difficult issue to resolve.
Extra PCs
You’re absolutely correct that most people don’t have useful retired PCs lying around, but the fact is that many people, whom would be using a PMS setup, do have is several PCs in their home which are not always being actively used.
Some machines could be designated as transcoding slaves while you sleep or while you’re at work.
Not all of ones family/friends will have the same work schedule or timezone but they may still like to enjoy your content.
Before you go on a tangent about the load would likely be lower during those times, one could have most of their family elsewhere in the world (other timezone) and thus ones system may experience higher load when you’re at work or asleep.
Also, ones work schedule may be a night shift, so maybe ones friends and family could enjoy ones PMS while one is working.
It’s Enough Already
The point it that just because your usage of PMS is one way, that does not denote how everyone can/should use it.
People like you are so closed minded, it’s really unbelievable.
Now, like others have noted before; you’ve made your point and this feature is clearly not for you… but just because you can’t comprehend why others would want it, doesn’t mean you have to continually harass others with your opinion over-and-over-and-over.
At this point you’re just trolling and that’s not what this community is about.
) or PMS’ Optimize (transcode in advance).
) or PMS’ Optimize (transcode in advance).
