Hi there! I have been thinking about changing my plex setup as I have been experiencing some problems/annoyances.
I have a macbook pro with 16gb ram and 2.7ghz i7 with my RAID5 on a roughly 5yr old mediasonic proraid (4x 2tb) connected via usb3. This is networked via a thunderbolt ethernet adapter to a cisco linksys e3200 router.
The main way I watch my media on plex is via the plex app on an amazon fire stick on my local network. I used to use the plex app on my samsung tv but it was absolute garbage (basically could never stream anything) since the TV does not have great network connectivity features…hence my purchase of the fire stick (also got it for other streaming apps/services).
Recently I have noticed that playback has again become an issue. I almost always have to set the transcode down to something pretty low so quality looks pretty crappy. I have also noticed that in general the RAID seems to be a bit slower to copy files to/from. I have ran some disk utils on it and havent seen any issues…so this is a bit confusing!
I am curious for input/suggestions on my current setup. Also, I am thinking due to the age of this RAID it may be time to build a new one…considering that I have seen that you can run plex directly on a NAS without the need for a computer. I am not sure if this would be a better route to go over just building another usb3 or thunderbolt raid to connect directly to my macbook and run plex on it like I do now.
If your client won’t direct-play your content, a NAS isn’t your first choice. NAS devices usually have a very weak CPU or aren’t capable to HW transcode the videos… even those who are capable to deal with video transcoding according to their brochures don’t have that feature necessarily supported by Plex.
If you want to be independent from your MacBook, throw in an extra NUC to act as the server and connect that to the NAS (purely used for storage).
Before getting there I’d look into why your media requires transcoding. Have you tried playing the stuff at original quality (on the fire stick… Settings > Video / Quality > Home Network). Also… considering you’re streaming via the fire stick which is not using a wired connection — have you checked if your WLAN could be the bottleneck in your setup?
Stop using the MBP & buy a used ex-corporate business PC off eBay. They are really cheap solidly built & reliable. There has been very little increase in CPU performance over the last five years & even an i3 system will serve you well. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G1 with an i3-4130 8GB RAM & 320GB disk for £70. There are similarly priced 3-4 years old systems available from Dell & Lenovo all with USB3 & modern i3/i5/i7 CPUs. https://m.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=hp+prodesk+400+g1&LH_BIN=1
@tom80H said:
If your client won’t direct-play your content, a NAS isn’t your first choice. NAS devices usually have a very weak CPU or aren’t capable to HW transcode the videos… even those who are capable to deal with video transcoding according to their brochures don’t have that feature necessarily supported by Plex.
If you want to be independent from your MacBook, throw in an extra NUC to act as the server and connect that to the NAS (purely used for storage).
Before getting there I’d look into why your media requires transcoding. Have you tried playing the stuff at original quality (on the fire stick… Settings > Video / Quality > Home Network). Also… considering you’re streaming via the fire stick which is not using a wired connection — have you checked if your WLAN could be the bottleneck in your setup?
Good point on the NAS not being able to transcode everything. That would be annoying…most of my media is MKV movies but I have some AVI, MP4, other random stuff too. Is there a reference that lists what a NAS can or cannot play??
Some media can playback at original quality on the fire stick…typically older movies I have in SD. But most of my HD content will skip/pause. Ive looked into my WLAN some…I know my router is solid quality (cisco e3200) and I have it configured to use the channels with the lowest interference. But then again sometimes when I am using the fire stick for netflix/other apps the stream quality will randomly drop…but overall its usually solid.
The idea of setting up an NUC/HTPC type of thing seems to be overkill to me…its just another computer drawing more power when I can just use my macbook as the server (I dont mind using it for the server). The NAS idea is enticing since I may need new storage anyways (and I dont think there would be much more power draw from a NAS vs normal raid)…but if it cant play all my media then that wont work.
In Plex the ability to play media is all down to choosing your client wisely & the Amazon Fire stick is not the best client.
Before I moved to storing my media on Google Drive & using Plex Cloud I used a 4TB Seagate Personal Cloud for my PMS. This must be the lowest powered NAS that can run Plex but I never had any problems playing media because I was not transcoding as my clients can Direct Play everything.
I use either an Odroid C2 (like a Raspberry Pi but 2-10x faster) running OpenPHT (basically the old Plex Home Theatre running on LibreElec i.e. an old version of Kodi) or an Amazon Fire TV 4K using the Plex client in MrMC (basically the old Plex Home Theatre running on a modern version of Kodi without naughty addons).
The clients are connected to an AV receiver with audio passthrough so all the exotic HD audio tracks are handled & they are connected to wired Ethernet.
I tested the Seagate Personal Cloud with five simultaneous 1080p streams & it coped easily because none of the clients required transcoding. People get very hung up on having a honking great server so that they can transcode multiple streams but you really really don’t want to transcode not least because it degrades the quality. In your home you should never need to transcode if you just choose decent clients. The only other reason for transcoding is if you have remote clients & you don’t want to have your network upload bandwidth swamped but in those cases a home based PMS is the wrong solution. Use a VPS with Cloud storage & all your remote users can then Direct Play (best quality) because they are no longer constrained by your network bandwidth.
Damn…I really should have bought the wired firetv and not the stick. Making me think the bottleneck here is wireless most likely. There must be alot of interference in at my apartment complex. That or my current RAID is really having some read issues…ive noticed it hiccups/buffers on itunes playback every now and then.
Everything else should be fine to run what I have since im not doing anything aggressive…one stream all local.
Small update…seems like a drive was failing in my RAID so it makes sense it was running so slow. It didnt fully fail until the other day. I also switched the USB3 connection over to eSATA running into a converter to USB. Apparently the USB port on the enclosure isnt very good…seemed to work a bit better after that do back up all the data on it. I am just going to replace the failed drive and see if that fixes all my issues since its a nice cheap option. If not…then I will be building a new NAS setup.
