I was wondering if I setup a raspberry pi Plex server (100mb) on a gigabit network with all my media on a bad also running at a gigabit, if I make all the media direct playable on all devices, including high bitrate media, will the media stream directly from the NAS, or does it still need to pass through the server, which is obviously a network bottleneck.
I have been asked by a friend to setup a cheap Plex system, and a pi 3 and NAS are already available.
Data will still pass through the server.
The server is just that, a server, it serves your media to your clients so all Plex streaming passes through the server. Direct play simply means the the stream is not processed as it passes through.
To piggyback on Otto’s post, there is minimal work done by the server if no transcoding is required, but the server still sends out the media to the clients.
Hi thanks, I thought this was the case, the reason I asked was something I saw mentioned about Plex cloud, whereby if a file can be direct played the server tells the client where to get the file from, I may have misread it but it would be a good feature to have.
If you are streaming video files to Direct Play in Original Quality on a GB network then the server will not be a bottleneck. An original quality Blu-ray might be 30MBps whereas a TV converted to MP4 might be only 5MBps. Even the simplest lowest powered NAS can stream at 50-100MBps. The simplest solution in this case would be to run Plex server on the NAS (if it can run PMS) & use the Raspberry Pi as the player.
I completely agree with you, and this is what I do, however my friend has a d-link NAS that does not support Plex, and they have Samsung smart TVs for clients.
In that case use the Raspberry Pi for PMS. The load when streaming video files to Direct Play in Original Quality is trivial & the Raspberry Pi is easily capable of doing the job.
