@JuiceWSA said:
If subs are the only hold-up to Direct Play, I just converted a show’s subs in PGS to UTF-8 (SubRip) with Xmedia Recode (Copy Video, Copy Audio, Convert Subs)… it took 12 seconds. That went so well I put 10 more through the queue in just over a minute. The episodes were 44 mins each.
It OCR’d them in 12 seconds. How accurate was the conversion? I only ask because I use SubtitleEdit. It’s much slower and produces many errors I have to manually fix.
@dragonmel said:
@Guineai can appreciate your predicament
I had my previous plex build running for many many years on a hackintosh build on a e8400… it had 8 drives running zfs and it was getting very long in the tooth and before a motherboard failure or mass drive dyoffs… as my drives had over 50,000 hours on them… I decided to do something new and build an esxi all in one with ZFS serving the datastores for Esxi interally vs using a filer via nfs/iscsi… so week and weeks of reading and learning esxi, linux (plex new host os) etc etc… finding the hardware I wanted … dual l5640 CPUs are almost perfect… low power… 24 threads and each thread is capable of dealing with the dreaded VC1 codec… but without mainstream h265 and 4k standards, clients etc… future proof is a questionmark… bottom line is even if I could fly out there tomorrow and drop a complete setup in your lap… it would probably be down in days… and since you didnt do it for yourself you would not have learned to walk the path and probably couldnt fix it easily…
my ‘suggestion’ and I really mean this poliltely is to repurporse an old PC for now or buy some POS on craiglsist as a learner / junker… your dad didnt teach you to drive in his porsche right…? and play with the plex server and some clients… play with some pre canned all in one setups… play with zfs …that will do much of the setup and heavy lifting… get an idea of what works… how it works… and how to admin it… then when you have an idea how all this works… go dump the coin to make it happen… personally if I were in your technical shoes… I would look really hard at Freenas… specifically 11.1 when it comes out in a couple of weeks… 11 is almost a beta although the latest 9 is really stable just lacks some new features and prettier web pages of the new 11. Freenas has a huge community… many use it as a all in one plex box so you will get excellent advice… and it puts a pretty good wrapper around zfs which is in most implementations a command line file system… its not hard to learn but its mostly commandline… freenas while dumbing it down will mostly keep you safe… and jails, plugins, and now docker I believe you can run almost your entire house IT requirements … plex, file sharing, nextcloud, home automation… etc etc all in the freenas web based environment.
getting a specific answer to a specific question is usually pretty easy around here… but your inital post is well… like going into the buddist temple of the Lama and asking for the meaning of your life… its going to be long, convoluted and may not get to the point of what you actaully want… only you can answer that…
there really is no shortcut here. you have to be able to install and admin all the pieces or you will have a broken setup in notime…
if you REALLY wanted to multipurpose… when plex first came out it wasnt a backend frontend it just ran everyting on a pc… and so you had to have the TV hooked to that box… and it was GREAT…
if you are building a media center / theater into the house and have an equipment closet behind it or decide you can build you freenas box whatever quiet enough to be in your theater rack… hooking it into your tv and runing a openpht or PMP client on the same machine as the server might have its bennifits… direct to the biggest TV for 4k without network latency, and a decent GPU that can also help perhaps your plex server with hardware support when it comes out… just a thougth…
I appreciate the detailed answers. The problem I have is that I am long winded and my ideas are always so picture-perfect in my head. Getting them down on paper so they make sense and then asking the right questions has always been my downfall. I guess what I really want for me to get started is a link to a build thread that is recent (not something from years ago), using new hardware, FreeNAS, ZFS, all the bells and whistles that you mentioned. I know there is no perfect rendition for what I am looking for, but if I had a foundation of say “Buy X, Y, Z to get started and do this” then I think I would have a better understanding of it all by cherry picking the pieces and asking about them more directly.
As an example, if I had a build to follow, I could post on here about the actual CPU he/she used and see if a better option was available for what I want to do. I know it is kind of hard to find something like that, but I definitely learn better that way. Especially considering how all of these concepts and technologies are new to me. I would feel better if I had something at least CLOSE to what I wanted to accomplish, and could just use a better CPU than he/she did to get better performance out of it.
Is there a way to actually play the MKVs I end up ripping directly on the TV through the receiver in lossless format with the need for a client at all? I was under the assumption it was not possible, especially with 4k. Hence why I was opting for this route. I just want a hardcore HTPC build I can follow or recommendations on a parts list. Rackmount chassis that would allow me to have the front facing hot swappable drives and still fit a fully focused HTPC in it with FreeNAS and ZFS and all of that. With a dedicated GPU, crazy intense CPU/MoBo and ECC RAM and still have plenty of room for cooling and what fans to use.
again… you should play with this stuff a bit before you go down your ‘production’ route… lern the language… learn plex a bit… as a test… not your whole setup…
google google google… like I said nobody is going to have a setup exactly the way you want it… and if you ‘learn to walk the path’ you will understand why you are doing what you are doing. read the FAQ pages here… read the server threads for the different OSs that it runs on to see the plus and minusus people have…
overall the best advice is to run plex on whatever os you know best… but if you want a powerhouse of a machine you might just have to roll your sleevs up and learn something new…
again…get a beater… load freenas 9 on it since its stable and can do your storage very well and run plex as an add on well… from what I have seen… and it puts it all behing a web gui taking 90% of the work out if it for you.
if you googled freenas plex setup I am sure there are hundreds of blog articals setting one up…
dont worry about whether your beater is going to work for the whole house dream system yet… just get your feet wet…
the FAQ has some info on processor choices but I and others here have written better ones… but dont put the cart before the horse…
@Guinea said:
Is there a way to actually play the MKVs I end up ripping directly on the TV through the receiver in lossless format with the need for a client at all?
Plex is always a client / server solution.
You always have a client (software) with Plex.
It is possible that server and client are running together on the same physical machine, but this makes things actually harder.
Even a Plex client which is able to playback full quality BR rips can live in a relatively small box and doesn’t need elaborate cooling. Thus you can get by with a small box which is perfectly silent in your theater.
The server on the other hand has a lot of hard drives which do make some noise
and it also has to transcode sometimes which then makes at least some wind noises.
And it produces more heat. So it makes perfectly sense to separate server and client into 2 separate machines which get connected by network wire.
The server can live outside of your theater room, (even in the basement if you have one that is dry enough).
this took all of 10seconds to find… a pretty good start… but again I would not go out and spend lots of money on hardware until you have a better idea of what you really want to do and are capable of doing with regards to operating systems and storage management… freenas is pretty liberal about hardware support other solutions might lock you out of certain stuff…
I understand what you are saying. I know I am asking for a needle (perfect config) in a haystack (potential configs) and there really isn’t one perfect configuration. The thing is, that I already have a Plex Media Server setup right now. I am trying to work on a replacement for what will match my desired design. Right now I am just using a QNAP TVS NAS and running Plex on it. All of my movies are just torrents of random quality and I use a PS4 as the Plex app client. I have a gaming PC that I use to do the downloads and just move the files to the QNAP.
It is a very basic configuration, but nowhere near what I want for the final setup. Mostly because of the quality of the streams. I am getting a lot of pixelation and lag during dark scenes or high action sequences. The audio is spotty at times and the subtitles are either non existent or broken or cause a huge amount of lag in the playback.
When I go to the new house, the home theater will be a really nice setup of TV/Receiver/Speakers. I haven’t purchased those yet, because I want to wait for newer technologies to come out or prices to drop. Since the house won’t be done for another 9-10 months, there is time for things to change. But in the meantime, I would like to play with the configuration for the media server and start setting that up. The reason I wanted a hardcore build to try and follow…is because certain elements are going to be a given. I don’t want to spent money on a “throw away” model, when I know I will need a heavy duty CPU. Why wouldn’t I just get the best CPU I can get now? Or something similar? Same thing for the chassis or MoBo? I feel like a lot of the hardware requirements are sort of a given, I just want to know a good setup and then where I could potentially upgrade. Once I have it built, then I can start doing the research on FreeNAS and ZFS and all the bells and whistles to get it properly configured to suit my needs.
Maybe it makes sense for me to shop and put together a part list I think will suffice and then post it here for feedback?
@NewPlaza said:
It OCR’d them in 12 seconds. How accurate was the conversion? I only ask because I use SubtitleEdit. It’s much slower and produces many errors I have to manually fix.
They looked good to me, but you can try one for yourself and find out in - 12 seconds (YMMV). The disclaimer here is that I had a Handbrake job running while I was coverting, so it could have gone faster I guess.
@Guinea you should go lurk on the FreeNAS forums for a while and check out what other people are running. There are a lot of Plex users on there and several run rack mounted systems.
It’s too bad threadripper isn’t quite ready, I think this would be a great option for what you want to do. An 8 core Ryzen system might also be an option once motherboards with verified ECC support become available if you care about your data and want to run something like FreeNAS anyway. Unfortunately all the proven systems for FreeNAS are almost entirely Intel.
ETA: A quick search over there shows that the Supermicro 846 series 4U rack mount chassis are the ones to look for as they have the SQ (super quiet) power supplies that don’t sound like jet engines when they are running. Something like this:
@JuiceWSA said:
@NewPlaza said:
It OCR’d them in 12 seconds. How accurate was the conversion? I only ask because I use SubtitleEdit. It’s much slower and produces many errors I have to manually fix.They looked good to me, but you can try one for yourself and find out in - 12 seconds (YMMV). The disclaimer here is that I had a Handbrake job running while I was coverting, so it could have gone faster I guess.
I tried XMediaRecode but was not successful in converting. Seems like it doesn’t handle IDX/SUB directly (app crash when add to queue). Oh well…
@Guinea said:
The reason I wanted a hardcore build to try and follow…is because certain elements are going to be a given. I don’t want to spent money on a “throw away” model, when I know I will need a heavy duty CPU. Why wouldn’t I just get the best CPU I can get now? Or something similar? Same thing for the chassis or MoBo? I feel like a lot of the hardware requirements are sort of a given, I just want to know a good setup and then where I could potentially upgrade. Once I have it built, then I can start doing the research on FreeNAS and ZFS and all the bells and whistles to get it properly configured to suit my needs.Maybe it makes sense for me to shop and put together a part list I think will suffice and then post it here for feedback?
Sadly, when talking about server setups you kind of have to do a lot of reading and understanding first of the systems you are going to run on it. Because they have a lot of requirements to fully work as intended. Sure, you can hack stuff together and regarding some requirements there are alot of debate going on (ECC for instance in terms of ZFS).
This following slight rant, is not to be taken at face-value - just trying to prove a point. So not all might be 110% correct, but hopefully you will get the gist of it. Say you buy a CPU which has no VT-D support, and then you find out you need passthrough because Esxi is the best… or you need 64GB of RAM because your ZFS storage is so large, but your mobo will not accept more than 32GB… or you find out you need to have two HBA cards to connect enough disks internally but they require PCIE 4x, but you only have PCIE 1x available because the Intel network card required to get the stability needed instead of the included Realtek crap on your mobo… Etc etc.
I am just afraid it could be a potential expensive learning trip for you. So keep that in mind if you go down that route of just buying ‘the best stuff available’.
