Hi everyone,
My current setup is using my MacBook for the server and the media centre… Which has been great but would love to get a Pi to liberate my mac from its static location next to my TV where it’s plugged into my external storage drives used for the servers media.
My thoughts are to get a Pi for rasplex which solves the media centre piece but leaves me with the server side of things to figure out… I know Pi doesn’t run server, but… Could I use it as the media location?
Example; plugging my external drives into the USB of the Pi and pointing my server at the drives as a location of the media from my mac? I understand it can be done as a NAS drive but wondered it this would work?
I really want to join the ranks of rasplex users but am not going to buy one if it doesn’t help me. Then causing it to become a piece of hardware that doesn’t get used.
Hi everyone,
My current setup is using my MacBook for the server and the media centre.. Which has been great but would love to get a Pi to liberate my mac from its static location next to my TV where it's plugged into my external storage drives used for the servers media.
My thoughts are to get a Pi for rasplex which solves the media centre piece but leaves me with the server side of things to figure out.. I know Pi doesn't run server, but.. Could I use it as the media location?
Example; plugging my external drives into the USB of the Pi and pointing my server at the drives as a location of the media from my mac? I understand it can be done as a NAS drive but wondered it this would work?
I really want to join the ranks of rasplex users but am not going to buy one if it doesn't help me. Then causing it to become a piece of hardware that doesn't get used.
@Finx_1 - I am not speaking from experience so I hope throwing my two cents into the ring is helpful. I see no reason why it cannot be done, but it does sound like it would be inefficient. From what I've read, anyone could use samba on the linux RasPlex distro, add the external storage (via USB), mount it as drives, and share the storage as a network share. I believe you'd have to do this through the command line since the GUI in the RasPlex skin is meant to be used like a Plex client.
As I understand Plex's client server model, the inefficiency comes into play when you consider the network traffic / load you're introducing onto the Ras Pi. Your RasPlex will essentially serve as your NAS device for the media and your Plex client. Therefore, to play a video from Plex Media Server onto the RasPlex, the Plex server will transfer the video file data from the share (hosted on the RasPlex) just to stream it back over your network to the RasPlex for playing. This is doubling the network load the pi has to deal with. Probably impossible over WiFi and while this may not be a problem for a gigabit network and devices that support a gigabit network, the load is primarily being put on 1 device that is not so powerful and that has 10/100 MB Ethernet port (not gigabit). Now I didn't do the math, and you may still be fine with that (in 10/100 Ethernet scenario), but just the idea sounds like it could be trouble. If it were me and I was very interested in using the Pi as my NAS, I'd get another pi. The best solution might be to just invest in another NAS solution. Hope this helps.
-MJR1284
@Finx_1 - I am not speaking from experience so I hope throwing my two cents into the ring is helpful. I see no reason why it cannot be done, but it does sound like it would be inefficient. From what I've read, anyone could use samba on the linux RasPlex distro, add the external storage (via USB), mount it as drives, and share the storage as a network share. I believe you'd have to do this through the command line since the GUI in the RasPlex skin is meant to be used like a Plex client.
As I understand Plex's client server model, the inefficiency comes into play when you consider the network traffic / load you're introducing onto the Ras Pi. Your RasPlex will essentially serve as your NAS device for the media and your Plex client. Therefore, to play a video from Plex Media Server onto the RasPlex, the Plex server will transfer the video file data from the share (hosted on the RasPlex) just to stream it back over your network to the RasPlex for playing. This is doubling the network load the pi has to deal with. Probably impossible over WiFi and while this may not be a problem for a gigabit network and devices that support a gigabit network, the load is primarily being put on 1 device that is not so powerful and that has 10/100 MB Ethernet port (not gigabit). Now I didn't do the math, and you may still be fine with that (in 10/100 Ethernet scenario), but just the idea sounds like it could be trouble. If it were me and I was very interested in using the Pi as my NAS, I'd get another pi. The best solution might be to just invest in another NAS solution. Hope this helps.-MJR1284
Thanks for the response.
The network traffic makes sense the bottleneck being in the LAN. Hmm.. As all the media is currently being stored in a USB/eSata RAID enclosure makes the choice a little difficult to just give up the hardware and buy a NAS enclosure. There are NAS adapters out there but very little of them support HFS+ and the ones that do cost more then the Pi.
I'm waiting for a new Mac Pro to be released too to make use of the eSata on the enclosure and will use that as my server (Amongst other things of course, been saving for it for nearly 2yrs)
As for a solution in the mean time.. guess I can give it a go and see what happens. But the majority of the video I have are 10GB+ .mkv files.. so it'll be close.. google is failing me at the question "Is fast ethernet 100 in and out or 50 in and out?" if the later then might come across a lot of buffering.
Potentially if bandwidth is an issue I could always login via MyPlex and drop the direct play and throttle the quality and see how that works out?
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
