I have been running Plex for about 4 years. I run it on a NUC (Next Unit Computing) system. My CPU has a benchmark score of about 10,000. It’s an i7, 16 gigs memory, blah blah. I can have about 8-10 family/friends connected with no issues as long as they aren’t all transcoding (can handle about 5 transcodes without issues though).
I now am getting fiber internet installed so only bottleneck is transcodes at times. I wanna build a duplicate hardware server which would cost about $700. Is there a way to have the two pieces of hardware load balance to share the work that is pushed out via fiber (1,000 up and down)??
What is the biggest cause of transcoding; the end users playback device not having the correct codecs to play a file so my end pre-converts it on the fly, correct?
If so, is Chromecast and Roku the best devices for end users to use for least chance of transcoding?
@theDwiz said:
What is the biggest cause of transcoding; the end users playback device not having the correct codecs to play a file so my end pre-converts it on the fly, correct?
I believe it depends on how your have encoded the files originally. If you have encoding them in a manner that Chromecast and/or Roku can play natively, then no transcoding is needed. If you encode them for Roku but your users all use AppleTV, then they may have to transcode them.
You can also have the Plex server pre-transcode your movies into multiple formats so that less on the fly transcoding is needed. Maybe you could encode one way on one of your servers and a different way on your other one. Then you could tell people that have Player X to use Server X and those that have player Y and Z to use Server YZ.
@theDwiz said:
What is the biggest cause of transcoding; the end users playback device not having the correct codecs to play a file so my end pre-converts it on the fly, correct?
This
or bitrate too high
or subtitles activated (even more so, when subs are in a ‘bitmap’ format, like PGS or VOBSUB)
If so, is Chromecast and Roku the best devices for end users to use for least chance of transcoding?
CC is the most restriced
Roku is better
the least chance of transcoding is if you are using
either Kodi (with Plex4Kodi Addon)
or Plex Media Player on PC/Mac
or the nVidia Shield TV console
You can put a proxy in front of the 2 to load balance. HAproxy is going to be your best bet. I can go into more detail if you want more info on how to set this up. its pretty easy.
Would this split the load of a single stream or would it decide on the server and stick with it for the entity of the stream? Also would the servers then have synced watch history? Would it have to be HAproxy or would ngix/apache reverse proxy work as well? Any answer is appreciated.
Yes, this is very true. I have different devices within my setup, so I opted to convert my content after recording it, or downloading it using HandBrakeCLI. After month and months of research on the best option, plus trial and error, I found this conversion worked the best. And will give you "Direct Play " for playback on your devices, which is great in a prefect world.
Enjoy all ! this keeps your format of the original to your newly streamed file. Meaning if the original is 1080p, your end file is 1080p, and likewise 720p and so on. Audio, if done in dolby 3.1 or 5.1, you’ll also get the same result on your convert file.
for many people the bottleneck on remote clients is often the server’s internet upload speed
if you are getting fiber, then you are probably getting a pretty fast upload speed, then your remote clients can most likely direct play.
ie if your getting 100+ meg upload, then as long as your clients are getting 20-30+ download then they should be able to direct play pretty much everything up to bluray quality.
assuming of course the clients are not transcoding because of codec incompatibilities as previously discussed above.
The proxy would identify the sever with the least clients connected to it and stick with that server the whole stream. As for nginx or Apache. Those are for reverse proxy. Maybe nginx has a load balancing function but I don’t have much experience with it. As far as the servers syncing with data about who has watched what, I would assume they would sync because it’s still all on one plex pass account but that’s just my theory.
Ahhh. I was hoping for something that would split stream across multiple servers because I cant get even 1 stream to go outside my network without artifacting. And on the syncing if it is just a sticky load balance one server will take an entire request and therefore only that server would have the watch history. Watch history is per server not per account. Even if all the servers are under the same plex pass account.
Oh ok. I actually see some weird artifacts while playing on my xbox one X locally. I have a really beefy 26 thread beast and I still see issues but if I play the same movie on the shield TV I see no issues whatsoever. maybe its a client issue?
