HI there, thought I’d post about this since I’ve recently got a Raspberry Pi 3 and one of the first things I tried doing is setting up PMS on it. I have the RP3 plugged in to my router (BT Homehub 4) directly with Ethernet and have a Synology NAS also plugged in to the same router.
I’ve mounted the drives so PMS on the RP3 can access them.
Performance so far has been hit and miss. I’m not sure what the best way of me being able to test this but it doesn’t look like the RP3 is really doing much in the way of transcoding. I’ve streamed a 500mb mkv file of a TV episode fine to my iPhone 6 (which I then sent to Chromecast tv), but it wont work with 1gb file in the same format. I don’t get an error but it just hangs.
I’d be interested to see if theres any settings I could try to improve performance or if theres anything I could do to help provide some more detail of my setup since I know what I’ve said is a bit vague.
So far I’ve tested streaming plex to
My macbook
Ipad 4
iPhone
Apple TV (via airplay)
Chromecast
It seems like if the video plays on one of them it will play on all.
I’d be interested to hear what anyone else’s experiences have been with a similar setup, and if theres any reccomended settings I could adjust beyond the defaults, such as transcoding settings. I appreciate I might need to ensure more of my video library is in a more suitable format going forward if the Raspberry Pi falls below the reccomended spec for PMS…
What audio and video formats are in the larger MKV file?
The Pi3 is much faster than the original and Pi2, but hardware transcoding is not yet supported, unles I’m way behind things. The Pi just doesn’t have the beef for heavy transcoding.
I’ve tried running Plex on an Odroid XU4, which I don’t believe the Pi3 can match in performance, and it can’t cope with most transcoding thrown at it.
@tannenba said:
Why isn’t transcoding supported? The Pi 3, I’m told is a 1.2Gz Quad core 64 bit processor. More powerfull than three computers I own.
Those three computers must be about 15 years old then. No offense intended towards the Pi3 (or to your computers!), but the Pi3 is not a desktop computer. You can’t simply look at clock speed and number of cores, ignoring everything else, and determine a speed.
@tannenba said:
Why isn’t transcoding supported? The Pi 3, I’m told is a 1.2Gz Quad core 64 bit processor. More powerfull than three computers I own.
Those three computers must be about 15 years old then. No offense intended towards the Pi3 (or to your computers!), but the Pi3 is not a desktop computer. You can’t simply look at clock speed and number of cores, ignoring everything else, and determine a speed.
It was doing fair on the Pi2, the Pi3 did terrible…If it’s not transcoding, something else isn’t implemented as well. On the Pi2 with WiFi, it was just way too slow, this time on the Pi3, most of the movies would not play.
@tannenba said:
Why isn’t transcoding supported? The Pi 3, I’m told is a 1.2Gz Quad core 64 bit processor. More powerfull than three computers I own.
The XU4 I have is an Octacore, 4 x A15 and 4 x A7 CPUs @ 2Ghz and I can tell you from personal experience that this will not keep up with transcoding all of my movies. Some, yes it will, but most, nope.
I don’t know what transcoding is, how many cores the Pi3B+ has, I don’t know if it can make coffee or tell me the future. All I know is that I have a Plex server set up on Raspbian Stretch and my movies all work great. Now, I don’t have 4K movies. All I have is 720p and 1080p shows and some classic movies. They all work great and look fantastic on a 65in TV. My set-up: Raspbery Pi 3B+ running Raspbian Stretch, Plex server on top of it, WD Black 1TB HDD in a powered enclosure connected to the Pi. In fact, I’m at work now having Seinfeld running on my phone. BTW, I tested this with someone over the Atlantic (I live on the West Coast) and he said it worked without stutter.
