Likely won’t get a lot of votes, but for those of us with a lot of users/myPlex users this would be great.
What I am suggesting is that Plex be able to utilize multiple machines to transcode files for a single library and server. I for example have 3 Macs in my home, but the PMS resides on one machine. That means that machine is doing all the heavy lifting to serve and transcode files to what for me is normally 5 simultaneous users…leaving my other two machines idle.
yes, I could set up PMS servers on each of those machines, but that would require me to manage 3 libraries and 3 different sets of invites - manually splitting my users/myPlex invites across those three servers.
It would be great to be able to have one library, one server, yet use all the horsepower in my home to serve up users.
EDIT: This would also be great for people who have a NAS, on which they could setup the PMS, but use the PCs/Macs in their home to transcode.
Apple has/had a built in distributed computing architecture called Xgrid. It’s possible this could be leveraged. That would be very sweet actually and allow for older Mac minis to see some use down the line.
click the "+" button then! :)
I will, but I think this voting system is pointless. Unless there is scarcity introduced, votes are meaningless.
The problem with load-balancing the trans-coding is the required bandwidth from the original source to the trans-coding server. The system would need to determine if there was sufficient bandwidth between hosts before offloading the trans-coding duties.
This could be a real problem in the average users home network if they use lots of WiFi or their internet uplink is tiny.
True, although i was thinking more along the lines that individual streams wouldn't be split up as much as Plex seeing that once one machine has reached a certain CPU usage, it would use the next server to transcode the next stream and so on...
I’m curious to see how the new transcoder throttling system in the new 0.9.7 series does with multiple streams. In theory, it should allow quite a few more streams without much load on the CPU. Let us know!
I will, however, the iMac that just fried was on the new alpha build 0.9.7...now in all likelihood the year of use had already probably done its damage, but i did want to make clear that the iMac was running that build.
what should we be reporting back.
I often have 2+ streams transcoding on inexpensive hardware (low power Athlon II) without any issues. The new 0.9.7 transcoding improvements have done a great deal to reduce CPU waste.
I’ve worked with load balancing in a number of environments and it really doesn’t apply well to this kind of work. It works well when there are lots of atomic calculations or one massive effort that is less time-sensitive in its parts. The coordination of the work being balanced would be fairly difficult here because the computational gain would be offset by the loss of local data access. Going over the network to get the data would consume most if not all of the speed advantage of having more processors.
Just how many clients could you be servicing through one instance?
A typical night is 5 to 7
100% sure it wasn't the media server that set your machine on fire :-p
Bold statement...
:P
