I would like to suggest a build of Plex media server for the Raspberry Pi, I'm aware the Raspberry Pi's GPU isn't upto much and the CPU is wonderfully slow, meaning transcoding would be slow to impossible.
So I would like a Plex Media Server to run on a Debian image on the raspberry pi, I don't require Cloud Sync or Transcoding. I just need the web interface, DLNA, it's ability to stream to the Plex Andriod/iOs applications and Plex Clients like the Roku or Chromecast.
My use case is a simple one, I support a large number of family PC's they all store media in a variety of ways which causes me headache's when I have to support it. Trying to convince them to buy a NAS is impossible, but if I give them a PI they will leave it on. Hopefully they will then migrate to using Plex to manage their media and at somepoint I can convince them to buy a NAS (if needed). I've tried using XBMC things like the Andriod/iOS applications as well as the Plex clients on the Roku/Chromecast add a certain level of polish. I suspect a DLNA server will be forgotten about.
It provides me a cheap way to introduce non technical people to a NAS.
The processor in the Pi is just too underpowered to handle this. By the time you outfit it properly to be a NAS, you will have spent more money on it than a cheap NAS.
I would like to suggest a build of Plex media server for the Raspberry Pi, I'm aware the Raspberry Pi's GPU isn't upto much and the CPU is wonderfully slow, meaning transcoding would be slow to impossible.
So I would like a Plex Media Server to run on a Debian image on the raspberry pi, I don't require Cloud Sync or Transcoding. I just need the web interface, DLNA, it's ability to stream to the Plex Andriod/iOs applications and Plex Clients like the Roku or Chromecast.
My use case is a simple one, I support a large number of family PC's they all store media in a variety of ways which causes me headache's when I have to support it. Trying to convince them to buy a NAS is impossible, but if I give them a PI they will leave it on. Hopefully they will then migrate to using Plex to manage their media and at somepoint I can convince them to buy a NAS (if needed). I've tried using XBMC things like the Andriod/iOS applications as well as the Plex clients on the Roku/Chromecast add a certain level of polish. I suspect a DLNA server will be forgotten about.
It provides me a cheap way to introduce non technical people to a NAS.
There is already a hacked together version floating around the forums - it is almost unusably slow and barely able to do anything - far from an ideal ambassador to the Plex world.
The processor in the Pi is just too underpowered to handle this. By the time you outfit it properly to be a NAS, you will have spent more money on it than a cheap NAS.
It isn't meant to be a fully fledged NAS, one of the families has a network drive, for the others I have a external USB drive I would be happy to lend out. The point is this is a low cost solution, I suspect a lot of people have a Pi hanging around and usb drives are common. Most people don't understand the point of NAS, selling them on buying one is hard.
The Raspberry Pi is perfectly capable of transferring data from USB to a network location at ~4 MBbps through a Samba connection (I've got a peak of 9Mbps transfer rate using FTP). This is fast enough to transfer music and SD quality streams via DLNA (~500 Mb seems to be the limit), I've had a Pi setup doing just this. If they have any files they are either AAC, MP3 or h.264 encoded MP4 files. Most devices they use tablets, phones, PS3's, etc.. will decode this nativily.
The biggest issue I can see isn't the CPU, which is enough to run a HTTPD server and run XBMC, is system memory, is 512MB enough? Again I suggested I would be happy to lose the transcoding features. The Pi has MPEG2 and VC1 encoding/decoding capabilities but I'm not even asking for Plex to take advantage of them.
4Mbps is far too low for many files. It is bus speed, memory and any number of other factors. Expecting the Plex team to support development on a platform where the user experience will be very bad is not realistic.
Considering bbc IPlayer streams Hd at 4mbps your badly wrong. Or would you like me to go to the effort of calculating data transfer rates etc…
Samba is CPU intensive slowing the data I/O rate. If your broadcasting UDP packets the rate will be limited by your reading rate.
Can we stop the provably nonsense counter arguments. If it ain’t a priority or interest fair enough if it is a massive effort again fair enough. But 4mbps not enough to transfer files, is nonsense
iPlayer receives at 4mbps. PMS is designed to provide multiple streams to clients simultaneously. The Pi makes a pretty good client. That does not mean it would make a passable server for files the size we are discussing. It lacks the memory to properly handle buffering on top of the operating system needed for the server processes.
I think you are taking for granted a number of hardware advantages often found in mainstream PCs that are just not there for the Pi. The Pi overcomes a lot of these as a client by having pretty good specialized hardware for H.264 decoding. Anything processor or memory intensive that can't be handed off to the video processing subsystem suffers.
