I’m a computer admin on a ship where 24 crew currently watch Plex media content on a mixture of Apple iPad 1’s and Apple iPad 2’s. The media is stored on a QNAP Nas with an Intel i3 processor. Typically at the weekend there maybe as many as 15 crew-members watching Plex media on their individual iPad’s. The iPad’s are obviously connected over WiFi. All iPad’s have been updated to the latest compatible IOS software and compatible Plex software for that IOS revision. The quality of the media streams vary enormously and is often unwatchable. Is the streaming quality dictated by the internal processor of the iPad, the fact that all streaming is done over WiFi or the processor of the QNAP server? I have read about Direct Play and have also read that iOS does not natively play mkv files. Does Direct Play insure better quality streams, and is it the server that transcodes mkv files to allow playback on the iPads? I assume that its the iPad’s processing power is the issue becuase a later iPad 4 plays media with good quality.
Due to the often poor quality and therefore sometimes unwatchable content, I would like to purchase Raspberry Pi 3’s running the Rasplex client to replace the iPad’s and run everything over a fixed LAN. Is it likely that the combination of a faster processor in the Raspberry Pi compared with the older iPad’s and the fixed ethernet connection will lead to a better quality stream and therefore a better user experience?
I like the Rasplex player because it literally allows Plex only and restricts Internet access. Other players such as Roku, Fire TV have too many other apps and shipboard Internet is extremely slow but expensive and I need to limit the crew’s access to it. Also a Raspberry Pi 3 is far less expensive than an Apple iPad.
NW bandwidth. Depending on your NW configuration (wired & wifi) you may be hitting a bottleneck there. even if you go to RasPi’s. Especially with 15 concurrent streams. What is your average bitrate? What is your network config from QNAP to user and in-between.
As for iPads, do you mean the VERY original iPad 1 & 2’s (like the very first ipads)? If so, yeah… Plex is going to be an issue on those.
Plex - Verify if you are getting Direct Play or are transcoding. If you are transcoding, then you maybe hitting processor bottleneck. Make sure you have HW transcoding enabled.
Disk I/O… if you have 15 streams concurrently, you could also become I/o bound… depending on # of drives you have. Check in resource monitor on QNAP to see what your I/o wait is on the 1st screen.
Switching to RasPi’s won’t fix #1 or #4. It may get to do direct play for everyone (which has the least impact on QNAP Nas CPU wise).
Hubby has no issue using Plex on an iPad 2 with h.264/mkv media over wifi.
Generally speaking though, Plex may not be the right tool for the job. You could look at using alternative video players such as VLC (with DLNA from PMS) or see if Infuse will work on those old iPads.
I would go with InFuse Pro if it runs on those old iPads. Will integrate into Plex DB, but plays about everything, but even then still may hit wifi/nw limit depending on bit-rate/etc, # of AP’s, etc.
Thank you all for your responses and have already learnt something!
The iPads are indeed the original kind that were purchased and used 8 years ago for Crestron control for the AV systems onboard. Over the years these were updated to iPad 2’s and have since been updated to iPad Mini 4’s. As with children, crew get given the hand me down’s which is why the Plex Player client is installed and used on a mixture of iPad 1’s & 2’s, two Raspberry Pi 3’s and an Apple TV 4 with the latter devices hardwired over Cat 6. Given that we have iPad Mini 4’s available, an iPad Pro and also a laptop I will test multiple concurrent Plex streams over WiFi to check network performance and will do so over the coming week. Complaints of poor video quality only come from the iPad users and occasionally seen on a WiFi connected laptop so it seems that WiFi could be the bottleneck.
Network config onboard is a mixture of fiber optic, Cat 6 & 7 backbone to latest gen WLAN Cisco controllers that in turn are connected to latest gen dual band Cisco access points. There are 2 AP’s in the Crew accommodation (its a small area) and WiFi coverage is good. We have four terminated Cat 6 cables to each crew cabin hence the thoughts of switching to local Raspberry Pi 3’s running Rasplex over HDMI to each TV. The QNAP NAS has 2 x 1Gb Ethernet interfaces connected directly to the switches but in the interest of testing we have the QNAP Plex Server listening on 2 separate networks. This has not affected performance and we are just trying to simplify overall network management.
In terms of media, its a mixed bag of mp4, avi & mkv files. Most movies are downloaded in 720p (or 1080p if its a spectacular / rated movie), because the files are smaller, take less time to download and because the crew typically watch on an iPad (small display). Within the Plex player I set the streaming quality on all iPad’s to 1.5 Mbps, 720x480 in the hope of aiding the streaming issue. If I increase the Streaming quality this changes transcoding. For instance watching a 720p mp4 with H264 codec movie on an iPad 2 running Plex version 4.0.6 (latest for iPad 2) limited to 1.5Mbps means that the Video is transcoded, the Audio direct play and the bitrate is 400 Kbps. If I increase quality by one level to 2 Mbps, 1024 x 294, both Video & Audio is transcoded. If I reduce below 1.5 Mbps, the video becomes very pixelated and the bitrate falls too. Compare this to an iPad 4 Mini watching the same movie running Plex version 5.4 with Playback Quality set to Original (1.1 Mbps, 720p HD), the bitrate is 1.5Mbps and the picture is perfect and Playback Info tells me that both Video and Audio is Direct Play. This is pretty telling, however the original iPad is limited to WiFi standard 802.11bn (my WLAN controller tells me this) and the iPad 4 is connected to standard 802.11ac.
I have loaded Infuse onto an iPad 2 and will do the same for the iPad 1, and once all metadata has loaded will start testing. I cannot test at the moment because Infuse displays a playback error and Infuse Help suggests that this is because the metadata is still loading. We have 7TB of media files so it will take some time to process. The maximum IO Wait Time on the QNAP has been 3.2%.
I’ll report further findings once I’ve had time to test further but would be interested to know if the Raspberry Pi is a good alternative if hard wired.
Verify that your Cisco Switch supports 802.3ad (port trunking) and if so, configure your QNAP for that as well. This will give you an aggregate 2Gb to handle the requests with (but no more than 1Gb for any host).
Since you are setting a static bitrate, you may be forcing transcoding for some scenarios which may be showing on the Plex Server side. Check your CPU load on the QNAP when running your test, as well as in Plex Server whether you are transcoding/direct streaming/etc.
Unless you have 802.11b ONLY devices onboard, disable 802.11b on your AP’s. That KILLs performance for everything else. Also remember that WiFi is SHARED bandwidth, unless you are running the new 802.11ac Wave 2 MU-MIMO spec on your AP’s. You are typically better with a narrower channel WIDTH (say VHT 40) vs. 80 in a multi-user setup.
If you have hard-wire ethernet options in the crew quarters, that will be your best option (using Raspi) in terms of performance vs. old iPads over legacy wi-fi protocols.
If your Cisco switches support PoE, then just get a few of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CNKX14C and you are in business. Use this on my RasPi 3b+ and works like a charm.
If you do that you force the server to transcode everything, what you need to do is to have all the media on the desired quality and have people reproduce it on original quality
We are looking to upgrade the switches so will confirm that port trunking is an option. The AP’s have Wave 1 MIMO not Wave 2. Current channel width is 20. Can’t see any clients operating on the 802.11b so will look at possibly disabling it.
In terms of transcoding and the bitrate on the iPads, in the older version of Plex running on the iPad 1 & 2’s there’s no option to set the stream to the Original quality and we know from past experience that our current NAS struggles on the CPU side. We were looking to upgrade the processor but are now looking at purchasing a replacement such as the QNAP TVS-1282T3-i7-64G, however if you can suggest another alternative that is rack mountable (the one above is not) then that would also be great.
Hardwired Raspberry Pi’s are def preferential to anything over WiFi and as we need to purchase a Switch for this application, I’ll insure its PoE compatible as this will help enormously. Thanks for your input.
Also have in mind that with that number of reproductions you need to apply some kind of traffic shaping
For example, lets say you have all your videos on 720p at 2Mbps, so theoretically it should only cause consume 2Mbps of traffic each, but you will notice that on the start of each play it will generate a traffic spike while it loads the cache that can cause problems to the rest of the users, so its a good idea to limit the maximum upload to something like 6Mbps per user.
You can find some good scripts for that in the forum but I dont know if you can implement it on that particular NAS
I would also make sure you get switches that support 10GbE capability as QNAP is bundling that in a lot of their new higher end servers. To be safe get something that supports 10Gb-TX & SFP+.
In terms of rack mount options, you have a few although unless you plan on running VM’s and such as well on the NAS I wouldn’t worry as much about maxing the memory at 64GB+. Plex doesn’t really use that much memory.
New Ryzen x77XU Family
No GPU by default, but if you use RasPi’s that can direct play, then not a big deal. You could also add a GPU and run Plex HW transcoding via Win10VM w/GPU passthrough. Plex in the future may get the option for direct GPU support, but currently not supported.
A few months have passed since my first question and based on advice from you all we will be updating our Cisco switches to 10Gb-TX & SFP+, and they will be PoE too.
With regards getting away from streaming anything over WiFi we are looking at Smart TV’s physically connected over LAN with the Plex app as our preferred option (less remotes and easier Internet access management). However as a backup to that, the latest Amazon FireStick or Raspberry Pi 3 both PoE ethernet connected. Which of these would have the superior trans-coding please?
I like the idea of the smart TV’s. I would probably look at the TCL line of Roku sets. That way you have Roku embedded + Plex app for Roku support.
As for backup, I would probably lean toward something like FireStick or Roku w/Ethernet. RPi3 you end up both having to support OS + Plex client, etc…
I think Roku has likely better direct play capabilities than most, but you have to go to the Roku Ultra for Ethernet support and I don’t know if that can be used with a comparable POE Power/Ethernet breakout adapter.
I’m not interested in going Kodi, just interested in the best physical device (client player) that runs Plex and is compatible with the most media containers and codecs. Also important is physical size. Nvidia Shield, Playstation etc are way too big. I need a player that would fit behind each of 20+ small (22-24") TV’s in a small cabin at the end of a bed that has a LAN connection and could be powered by PoE. Hence my question regarding the Amazon FireStick, Raspberry Pi 3 or similarly small footprint alternatives. Our aim is to use a 22-24"Smart TV, but there are not many of those that are still available. Most of the big TV manufacturers have recently stopped making them. I don’t think that the Roku Ultra unfortunately can be powered over PoE and the Roku TV’s are also too large for our application.
Any further thoughts appreciated and a Merry Christmas to one and all.
We run ATV’s elsewhere and indeed excellent at the job, but the problem we have is power. Any device has to be capable of PoE. That immediately rules out the ATV. The Roku Ultra is 12V @1.5A and 5W max power so potentially withing the range of a PoE adapter but this will need testing. However really I’m asking for people’s input/experiences on smaller streaming devices, that can def be powered over PoE.
I have gen1 firestick, was ok but definitely underpowered. I also have the 2nd gen Roku StreamingStick. Not bad… didn’t feel as underpowered at gen1.
You could go with the new Roku 2018 Premier/Premier+ as those both have usb micro power and are relatively small, but then you are dealing with 2.4 WiFi as they have no Ethernet ports.
I think your best bet for having both Ethernet Port and POE power option would be a RasPi setup. I don’t know that the POE HATs for RasPi are real reliable yet, but can use a splitter POE adapter to deal with that easily.
I haven’t dealt with trying to setup an IR Remote with them though so that might be a challenge (just not sure headache factor on that).
I’ve realised I’ve made a mistake and asked for advice on PoE capable client players, but I also need the client player to be connected to the network over Ethernet and not WiFi. This of course means that the Amazon Firestick is not an option.
The Roku 3 and AppleTV 4K have ethernet (wired) as well as wireless capability.
Neither of them are PoE compatible due to the power requirements of the devices.
