My weekend project was going to be cutting a whole in the wall in our upstairs office (where we leave the late-2012 quad core Mac Mini running 24/7 and also acting as our RasPlex server) and feeding a CAT6 cable downstairs to our living room where our FiOS cable/router terminates behind our TV setup.
Right now I’m using a Pi2 that’s hard-wired into our FiOS router. The upstairs Mac Mini server is currently using WiFi and, at least according to what OSX is telling me, the transfer speeds are approximately 130 Mbps.
My question to the group is… am I wasting my time running this CAT6 cable through the wall if my sole purpose is to improve the streaming quality/speed of our Rasplex client downstairs? Is the Mac Mini’s ~130 Mbps already supplying at or beyond the throughput speeds that the Rasplex can handle?
I use the Mac Mini as our primary desktop computer so I’m sure there would be other advantages of being hard-wired to the network, but am I fooling myself in thinking I will see a difference in Rasplex performance?
@naddel81 said:
you can answer it for yourself: Is there any content that is over the bandwidth that your mini provides?
if no: then there is no gain in a faster connection.
I’m not sure. Occasionally RasPlex playback will “stutter”, sometimes very rarely a movie (20 GB blu-ray rip, DTS) is unwatchable. It’s tough for me to isolate whether these issues are network-related or CPU-related. I guess I was really just hoping for someone to write back with “YEAH DO IT!” :-/
Yes, do it!
It will improve at least the reliability of the network connection.
With wire, you get a guaranteed usable bandwidth.
With wireless, conditions may and will change - usually at the least convenient moment.
Especially if you want to stream high-bitrate files, a wired client connection is always recommended.
The Plex server should always be wired up to the router, btw.
I get that occasional “your server is too slow” warning, although I am on a gigabit connection and the server laughs about transcoding audio (video is never transcoded). I know the culprit is Plex, so I am annoyed buy I would never update to a 10GBE connection, because I know it is not the solution.
You can change to wired connection, but I highly doubt it will fix the problem.
@naddel81 said:
I get that occasional “your server is too slow” warning, although I am on a gigabit connection and the server laughs about transcoding audio (video is never transcoded). I know the culprit is Plex, so I am annoyed buy I would never update to a 10GBE connection, because I know it is not the solution.
People need to understand that 10GbE is not a panacea. It is expensive; The RPi is not fast enough to implement it; You need fast SSD drives to get it better than 1GbE. Read the primer.
10Gbe is really only useful for a SAN deployment in 99.9999% of Plex environments. But I think this was started because of the cat 6 cable, which is 10Gbe rated for short runs.
I had the same problem, so placed the MAC MINI in the basement for hardwire to the main switch and ran a 30ft Thunderbolt cable to the 2nd floor office to the Thunderbolt dock which connects to the Thunderbolt Monitor.
