What hardware I need for 20 streams?

General Discussions
1

Hi,

Atm we stream content via the Google drive but for the teachers that doenst work as good as the Plex app. We tested it for a few months now on a older pc but now its time for the real work and want to buy a video “server”.
The most important feature of that server must be that it must be able to perform 20 streams at once. So I red your pages, found out about passmarks and stuf like that but its for me a bit complicated.

Therefor I hope some1 out there can point me in the correct direction cause atm I have one company who sells me a powerfull workstation for almost €8000 but another one is 2x more expensive because they say I need a special CPU. I red that we need roughly 2000 passmarkt per 1080p stream so that would be an CPU with passmakr 40000. Those cost around €5000 each.

Hope you can advice me, thanks

2

20 simultaneous 1080p Transcoded streams will take an ENORMOUS amount of CPU horsepower. Frankly, I doubt your school system has that kind of money earmarked for use in the budget.

A more ‘normal’ higher end modern computer ‘may’ be able to handle 20 simultaneous Direct Play streams without issue - unless the Network becomes the issue with insufficient bandwidth.

The Audio Visual Department - I assume that’s you ( :wink: ) - will have to do some testing and possibly some homework developing some skills encoding, remuxing, altering and customizing the preparation of your media to ensure it Direct Plays across all your devices, then start delivering these streams and find out if and where things start to break down.

Plex is fantastic for the home user in that a standard home computer can, in most cases, transcode and deliver 1 or perhaps 2 1080p streams. Push that to 20 and you need one of these:

Media Preparation can be done quickly and easily enough by just about anyone with a few skills and the willingness to do the work and that could mean the difference between buying the above or this one below:

Many people use MakeMKV to rip the base streams from DVDs and Blu Ray discs for home use. That’s fine, but the problem is that usually produces streams with bit rates in excess of 30MBps. As an educator it will be easy for you to start adding these up to see where the problem is going to be delivering those kinds of bit rates across a local network.

However, if the AV Department (again, you) performs another step - breaking those MKVs down with Handbrake (or other) to more reasonable bit rates - say 3.5 MBps while ensuring the material Direct Plays across these devices the network may be able to deal with those without issues. The differences in quality ‘may’ be visible to the Human Eyeball, but the Eyeballs in my head can’t really see them and if it means the difference in systems between the two images above I’d go with the latter.

If the AV Department (you) can work this out, develop these skills and make it happen you will be highly sought in your new career as AV Department Chief for the entire school system in your area and be able to write your own ticket. There’s some incentive for ya… :slight_smile: Not that you need any. My Father was an educator and would have gone to any length to help just one of his students and would have climbed Mt. Everest if it meant helping hundreds or thousands.

Teachers are indeed special and should be considered a National Treasure no matter which Nation they reside in.

3

LOL!!!
EXACTLY!!!

4

Are you streaming or transcoding? Streaming takes no power. If all the clients natively support the video being streamed then you can use a desktop pc and you’d be fine. And considering the number of streams and the cost for transcoding that many I would ensure the video formats are all supported and then go much cheaper.

5

Isn’t that what @JuiceWSA said???

6

No one talks about multiple servers !

Is that an option in this (and other multiple users scenarios ) situation?

7

Its all about the CPU. For streaming I need passmarks.
Xeon has them and we have 2 now with a total of 40000 passmarks good for 20 streams simultanious.

8

Just curious, what Xeon did you get in the end? I was thinking a good price/performance candidate would be the i7-6950X: it has a single thread passmark of ~2000 (more than my microserver multithreaded passmark LOL) and 10 cores for a passmark of ~20’000, which means each core is very efficient, and even a single core could be able to transcode moderately complex material.

9

@h.hoogendam said:
Its all about the CPU. For streaming I need passmarks.
Xeon has them and we have 2 now with a total of 40000 passmarks good for 20 streams simultanious.

Exactly, multiple servers like the xeon’s suggested would work fine, as mentioned by previous forum members. I would definitely Optimize the files in a Quality mp4 format. I’m gathering the clients will be Web Clients or are we looking at Smart TV’s with TV apps or PMP Companion player, HDMI to TV/PC monitors or even Screen Projection. Depending on which method of delivery the Audio stream would be best if not Trans coded and thought put in place with which Audio format was used to avoid issues. Another consideration may be your network being Gigabit and 10 Gigabit switches. If subtitles are required even more considerations are required with audio.

10

@h.hoogendam did you get this implemented already?

If so how’s it working out so far?

Carlo

11

@h.hoogendam said:
Its all about the CPU. For streaming I need passmarks.
Xeon has them and we have 2 now with a total of 40000 passmarks good for 20 streams simultanious.

For transcoding, you need Passmarks. For streaming (i.e. DirectPlay), not so much.

A dual Xeon workstation/server can handle 20 concurrent DirectPlays. Your network, as others have noted, will need to be up to the task though especially if there are multiple high bitrate streams involved.

12

Of course when transcoding comes into play the specs of the file to be transcoded are very important, especially the format (h265 is more resource intensive, VC-1 is not multi-threaded etc) and the bitrate (Plex recommendations only apply to medium bitrate). Maybe you’ll need a 4-socket server :smiley:

13

I doubt even a four socket Xeon could do twenty concurrent 1080/x264 transcodes at least in software.
HEVC? Not a chance.

14

If your clients aren’t bitrate limited then if you pre-process your files and convert them to a format that will allow them to direct play on all devices then you don’t have to worry about transcoding.

On an old 2.8GHz i7 (1st gen) I’ve streamed over 20 connections at one time.

Once you start getting people trying to play over crappy connections and need transcoding the game can change.

15

I know this is an old thread but things have changed since and I am sure people would like to know where things stand.

To do 20 streams, a few things are needed,

  • Enough hard drive speed to keep up. RAID or the data spread across several drives may be needed to achieve this.
  • An estimated 10,000 passmark minimum CPU for general operation and audio transcoding.
  • A GPU, CUDA core suggested, at least a GeForce GTX 970. Intel Quick Sync will also work but I do not have or know it’s capability to figure a comparable model.
  • Windows 10 or Linux, In order to have the patch-able GPU drivers.
  • A patch to change the 2 stream limit on the Nvidia GPU, Windows 10 and Linux currently.**
  • A gigabit network and a FAST internet connection. ***

** https://github.com/jantenhove/NvencSessionLimitBump was the patch used for this test.
*** Transcoding is typically for remote streams and some limited devices. Local streaming often ends up being a direct play or direct stream which requires much less processing so transcoded streams are assumed to be for remote users. This is why a fast Internet connections is on the list of what is needed.

I have done 14 hardware transcoded streams at once, mixed local and remote, 5 local 1080p @ 10 mbits and 9 remote 720p @ 4 mbits. All source files were 10-20 mbit bitrate. My 14k passmark CPU was averaging 50% load and the GPU was around 70%. Averages were hard to figure because it was a very bouncy graph. Everything was stable and did not seem to show any indications of slow down indicating it should be able to do a few more streams. I also did not notice any difference in quality between GPU and CPU transcoding. I was very pleased with the outcome of this test.

I did try this on a Windows 7 PC and was unable to patch the driver, so as of now it looks like a clear NO on getting this to work on Win 7.