Hi,
I am new to Plex, and the plexconnect. Got an aTV 3 about a week ago.
I have no issue so far, I just want to share some results I found through trial & error.
My media server is a Core2Duo 2GHz with USB bay, it runs Linux Mint. It was mostly a file server for a WD Live TV, but now the aTV is here, and I really like Plex.
I initially installed Plex on that server and got working results from the Web Client with a Full HD movie (bluray dump, MKV file). CPU got high, but it was good.
Moving to the aTV, I just god still images, or just green screen. Playing with the bit-rate in ATVSettings.cfg down from 40MBits to 10, I could have 5s video for 5s wait (and the quality degradation was noticeable). The Linux box CPU was just at 100%. As I could play lower bit rates movies, I just assumed I ran out of power.
So I moved back to an old Xeon based server sleeping in my garage, L5408 at 2.13GHz, quad-cores, a bit faster than the Core2Duo. Installed Linux, Plex, plexconnect and it was a bit better. Still no issue with the Web client, but on the aTV (ATVsettings rate at 40MBits) I got 8s video for 1 to 2s pause. Great image quality! Looking at the CPU usage, again all cores 100%...
So, running out of power, I turned to the last system I have, a Core i7 based, 8 cores beast. Install a temporary drive (I really can't mess with its daily usage or else...) install Linux, install Plex, install plexconnect. Fire up the same movie. Aha! Works! Excellent, fantastic. Turning to System Monitor. What? All 8 cores are at 100% usage. God! Let the movie run for a little while, and after 3 or 4 minutes, the CPU dropped on average to 40% but in a peak & idle fashion (100% for 10s, below 15% for 10s and so on). Now I could see network speed varying in the 25 to 40MBits/s. Nice!
My limited understanding is that there is heavy CPU usage at the beginning to create a transcoded buffer ready to stream, and once the buffer is full, we just have to fill it real time, and less power is required. It all boils down to how fast the CPU can crunch data in. If you crunch slower than what is streamed it will freeze and wait, or even not start at all...
Plexconnect on its own does not requests much, I finally moved it back on the Core2Duo machine and it really does not impact the machine. The power hungry part of this is the Plex server. So if you plan for a machine to run Plex, the bigger, the better. I will now start saving to get a decent power Plex Server dedicated machine (I wish I could keep that i7...)
I would be interested to have other users report what CPU spec the use to get flawless Full HD MKV streaming to their aTV. Just curious to know where the threshold is. My test machine used an i7 3770s.
