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MeKeV posted:Skipping back/forward is less reliable on transcodes. This definitely... Though I would imagine a faster CPU would help with this. I have my server on a lowly i3-4300. If a video is being transcoded it takes 1-2 seconds for video playback to resume after a seek.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:00
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IOwnCalculus posted:How old is that Xeon? Rule of thumb is something like 2000 on Passmark is enough for one transcode, and I can't think of any 8-core Xeons that would be 4000 or below on that. E5-2650 v2. Ivy-Bridge era Xeon at 2.6ghz and 3.1ghz all-core boost. I'm guessing it definitely matters, but in my test I was transcoding 2 different 4k sources to the 20mbps high quality profile in Plex. Probably the system would have an easier time transcoding lower-resolution sources. Plex is also running in a FreeNAS jail which is virtualized on ESXi, so there is some overhead to deal with. I didn't actually try to transcode 3 4k streams simultaneously - I was just going by ESXi's processor usage estimator as an indicator of what the system is capable of.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:01
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Ah, I haven't tried transcoding 4K sources yet. I've got dual E5-2620 V1s in mine and when transcoding 1080p or less it never even has to work constantly - it caches ahead and Plex throttles back. Edit: Just tested one. Solid 40-50% CPU usage so far, and I have less overhead than you do (Plex in a Docker container on Ubuntu). It is going fast enough to throttle down, but only just. 
IOwnCalculus fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 18:13
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Yeah, I was going to say, I think at this point people still assume you're talking about 1080p content unless you specify.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:17
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I also just realized that my test was transcoding down to 720p. Targeting 1080p 20Mbps brings the CPU load to a solid 50-55%. Yeah, 4K transcodes are gonna hurt. Oddly enough I have two different source files for the video I'm testing, one 4K and one 1080p. I would have figured that for any client requesting 1080p or less it would default to using the lower-res source but it seems to be using the 4K source no matter what.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:23
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I've run into an issue twice where Plex just forgets I have any media in my folders. If I do a scan, I can see the bar at the bottom finding things but nothing actually shows up in the Library. Filenames haven't changed since it worked. If I do a repair, there's a chance that it'll work again until I reboot. All media is stored on a NAS mapped to drives on the PC PMS is on. Anyone have any ideas? Version 1.10.1.4602
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Jan 25, 2018 19:52
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emocrat posted:This is a general question, not geared at particular poster. Why do people care so much about direct play? Are you all running this on systems that cant handle a single transcode stream? Is it a purity/perfect signal thing where we can't abide the notion that an imperfection may have been introduced? My server doubles as my gaming machine thanks to GPU passthru and CPU isolation. I also share my Plex library with some friends and family. Any time I can get Direct Play is a huge benefit, transcoding is really expensive even on modern hardware. As someone else mentioned too, a lot of people run like low powered NAS hardware like Synology where even a single transcode can be problematic.
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Jan 25, 2018 19:55
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emocrat posted:This is a general question, not geared at particular poster. Why do people care so much about direct play? Are you all running this on systems that cant handle a single transcode stream? Is it a purity/perfect signal thing where we can't abide the notion that an imperfection may have been introduced? It's a waste of resources to not have your media served up natively without the need for transcoding in a local setup. Like yes, it's a cool feature that Plex can transcode media so that all your stuff can be played back everywhere, but that is not ideal, especially in a local setup where it's easy to ensure Direct Play always happens. The ideal scenario is always serving up content in its original quality. And a Plex server not having to transcode content locally has more resources to serve up transcodes remotely.
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Jan 25, 2018 20:11
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Sooooooo, Plex announce PlexVR yesterday, a Google Daydream compatible Android app. This is the first thing that's ever made me even slightly interested in VR. Being able to lay in bed with headphones on and watch a movie on a virtual movie theater sized screen really appeals to me. Finally, a new feature from Plex that doesn't sound entirely like, "Why would you do this?". I'm really happy I have a Google Pixel right about now (and I only got that because it was my refurb after massive battery issues with Nexus 6P).
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Jan 25, 2018 20:40
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I'm new to Plex. I've tested it before as a replacement to my current Kodi setup (external db hosted on a NAS) but it ended up not performing very well and I didn't really need transcoding since everything it was connected to was running Kodi anyway, my internet had whopping 1mbit upload bandwidth so it was useless for that. Things have gotten a little bit better re: internet, I now have 20mbit/s to burn. This makes streaming to me and my family's phones a bit more practical and maybe I could even hook my grandma up. I'm not hugely concerned with quality and since Australia still charges obscene amounts for mobile data the more compression the better. What kind of hardware would I need to encode, worst case, ~4 480p videos at the same time? I have a spare Ryzen 3 1200 in my closet, if that's not enough maybe I could put a Ryzen 5 or 7 in it?
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Jan 25, 2018 20:53
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insularis posted:Finally, a new feature from Plex that doesn't sound entirely like, "Why would you do this?". It’s an interesting tech demo, but I can’t imagine actually using this for more than about 15 minutes personally.
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Jan 25, 2018 21:22
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EL BROMANCE posted:It’s an interesting tech demo, but I can’t imagine actually using this for more than about 15 minutes personally. I dunno, man. After a long work day and then managing a very active 3.5 year old kid for the rest of the evening, closing myself off to the world and watching Fight Club or something on a big, big, big screen sounds like a two hour vacation. I'll report back with how reality measures up to my hopes.
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Jan 25, 2018 21:50
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What I want to know is - if you're laying down in bed wearing the headset, is virtual you staring at the roof of the virtual room instead of watching whatever is playing?
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Jan 26, 2018 05:35
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SwissCM posted:I'm new to Plex. I've tested it before as a replacement to my current Kodi setup (external db hosted on a NAS) but it ended up not performing very well and I didn't really need transcoding since everything it was connected to was running Kodi anyway, my internet had whopping 1mbit upload bandwidth so it was useless for that. Most of my stuff is ED (480P) and although my PMS has never had more than a couple transcodes running at once an i7 never seems to break a sweat. The recommendation for transcodes is ~2k on Passmark for FHD content and 1.5k for HD; since ED frames are a fraction of even HD, I'd assume, conservatively, that each transcode should take <1k; the Ryzen 3 should be fine. Also, hardware transcoding is now supported if you have either Intel QuickSync or nVidia NVENC. insularis posted:Sooooooo, Plex announce PlexVR yesterday, a Google Daydream compatible Android app. This is the first thing that's ever made me even slightly interested in VR. Being able to lay in bed with headphones on and watch a movie on a virtual movie theater sized screen really appeals to me. Finally, a new feature from Plex that doesn't sound entirely like, "Why would you do this?". I ran a movie in Bigscreen (a desktop-casting VR application) a few weeks ago and playing it in the virtual theater was fantastic! Other people were able to drop in or out as desired, and I've strongly been thinking of hosting an advertised, scheduled movie night in the near future. I felt guilty though because my gaming PC was being pegged just to play a video file in ~VR~ but being able to do that with a phone in Daydream would be way more efficient. porksmash posted:What I want to know is - if you're laying down in bed wearing the headset, is virtual you staring at the roof of the virtual room instead of watching whatever is playing? I would presume that you can re-center the headset like you can generally do in other VR applications. I mean it's a little different with external tracking like the Rift or Vive, but phone VR and Windows MR shouldn't care if you're reclining or not.
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Jan 26, 2018 09:10
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Atomizer posted:Also, hardware transcoding is now supported if you have either Intel QuickSync or nVidia NVENC.
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Jan 26, 2018 16:12
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insularis posted:I dunno, man. After a long work day and then managing a very active 3.5 year old kid for the rest of the evening, closing myself off to the world and watching Fight Club or something on a big, big, big screen sounds like a two hour vacation. I'll report back with how reality measures up to my hopes. Okay, so after a few hours, here's my take. It's cool. It's really cool. However. Maybe it's just the early days of the app causing it, but during one movie, my phone overheated enough that it crashed (30% battery drain in 40 minutes). Resolution is... okay. Your HD content is going to look more SD. That said, no worse than being in the mid back rows of a movie theater. Could I see using it every day? No. Two or three times a week? Absolutely. The total engagement is really nice, and the app itself is pretty nice. If the phone display were 4K, and overheating didn't happen, I'd give it 8 out of 10. As it is, 6.5 out of 10. Awkward to fit in the headset if you're using anything other than the most minimal of cases. Worth the cost of the Daydream headset? Umm, next gen phone display, yes, it would be. Right now, priced high for what it is, in my opinion. The big annoyance to me is that I wanted to be able to use this lying down, and the Plex VR app won't handle anything other than sitting upright.
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Jan 27, 2018 04:25
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porksmash posted:What I want to know is - if you're laying down in bed wearing the headset, is virtual you staring at the roof of the virtual room instead of watching whatever is playing? The streaming vr porn I’ve looked at out of curiosity have the problem where you can’t readjust your point of view, so laying down = staring at the ceiling. This is with the same google cardboard devices so it may be different if you’ve got like a $500 oculus or whatever.
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Jan 27, 2018 09:10
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Wacky Delly posted:This is nice because HEVC still pushes my i7 a fair bit. Which i7 do you have? QuickSync got full encode/decode support in Skylake, so if you have an older generation like I do the CPU will still have to brute-force it. insularis posted:Okay, so after a few hours, here's my take. It's cool. It's really cool. However. Maybe it's just the early days of the app causing it, but during one movie, my phone overheated enough that it crashed (30% battery drain in 40 minutes). The lower-resolution "effect" is really just because you're only seeing a small portion of the screen. So even if you have a FHD video and are using a FHD phone, only a small chunk per eye is visible, so realistically all you can see is SD/ED. The Rift and Vive, for comparison, only give you ~1.3 MP per eye (FHD is ~2 MP). Even if you had a phone with a QHD display (~3.7 MP) and put it in the headset, you'd get less than half of that per eye, so still not enough to accurately reproduce FHD. You're right in that you'd need a UHD display (not gonna happen any time soon on a phone though) just to see FHD content natively. Boris Galerkin posted:The streaming vr porn I’ve looked at out of curiosity have the problem where you can’t readjust your point of view, so laying down = staring at the ceiling. This is with the same google cardboard devices so it may be different if you’ve got like a $500 oculus or whatever. For research, of course. 
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Jan 27, 2018 09:45
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It seems like it’s a general problem with orientation based control systems to be honest. I can’t stand most iPhone games where you have to hold the phone a specific way because that means I can’t play the phone laying on my side in bed, for example. The games I have in mind are the “jump up up up” type games that were popular some time ago. None of them had a “set your current phone orientation as normal” option as far as I remember. Not sure if this is out of laziness from the developers or that iOS just doesn’t allow this.
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Jan 27, 2018 11:46
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insularis posted:Okay, so after a few hours, here's my take. It's cool. It's really cool. However. Maybe it's just the early days of the app causing it, but during one movie, my phone overheated enough that it crashed (30% battery drain in 40 minutes).[etc] I watched the lon.tv guy on YouTube do his review yesterday, and I'm still not sold at all. It seems designed more to have things interfere with the watching than providing an isolated watching environment. I definitely appreciate the desire to get away from it all (I don't have kids, but a bit of bedroom TV watching is always nice and using the spare room for this if my wife is asleep works enough for me) but it all feels overthought and gimmicky. I hope they don't dedicate too much production time to it. I also get flashbacks to using an Olympus Eyetrek back in 2001 or so and my eyes are still stinging from that day. I'm sure the new stuff isn't like that.
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Jan 27, 2018 22:50
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:Chromecast is cool but using my phone as the remote got annoying pretty quickly to me. I'm wondering what the Venn diagram is between people who rave about Chromecasts and people who live with kids or family And I find Chromecast no where near as bullet proof as some people act
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Jan 27, 2018 23:05
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I found that the PlexVR app behaves like the YouTube VR app, in that you can drag the video screen around, including to the 'ceiling' for when you are watching while lying down. If you recenter, it will go back to the default orientation. I also was getting overheating while using it, but that's also been my experience with other VR apps on my Pixel 1
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Jan 27, 2018 23:44
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Atomizer posted:Which i7 do you have? QuickSync got full encode/decode support in Skylake, so if you have an older generation like I do the CPU will still have to brute-force it. Skylark, but I don't have the Intel gpu drivers installed. Plex also uses NVEnc now so it's kinda moot.
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Jan 28, 2018 01:24
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Wacky Delly posted:Skylark, but I don't have the Intel gpu drivers installed. Plex also uses NVEnc now so it's kinda moot. Just FYI, Maxwell implemented partial HEVC support, with Pascal fleshing it out further (e.g. 10b.) I mean I'd assume most people to have upgraded to Pascal by this point, although it's totally plausible to have an older GPU in what may be primarily their media center machine rather than a full gaming desktop.
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Jan 28, 2018 02:06
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I tried Quicksync on my server and the stream looked like rear end and eventually crashed. Even the QS option in Handbrake was garbage looking
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Jan 28, 2018 02:24
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Which cpu-offloading tech is the best for not losing quality? My server uses a ten series Nvidia and haswell cpu
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Jan 28, 2018 02:36
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WhyteRyce posted:I tried Quicksync on my server and the stream looked like rear end and eventually crashed. Even the QS option in Handbrake was garbage looking QuickSync is for speed at the expense of quality. It's designed for applications where either CPU usage has to be kept to a minimum (or you have something underpowered in the first place like Braswell) or where you don't really care about crystal-clear output, like game streaming over Twitch or wherever. Tatsuta Age posted:Which cpu-offloading tech is the best for not losing quality? My server uses a ten series Nvidia and haswell cpu You could possibly try QuickSync AVC transcoding with that Haswell but as far as output quality goes your best bet is probably NVENC.
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Jan 28, 2018 03:57
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I've got one of those $75 offers for a lifetime plex pass in my email box. I haven't had it since they rolled out their very first Plex with the live TV/DVR feature. Is there anything really beyond the DVR/Live TV and mobile sync that's worth signing up for? I suppose the aforementioned quicksync capability is a plus too.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:11
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Not really. It's nice to give them money if you use their poo poo every day, but that's about it.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:18
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I've been constantly anticipating the moment that I will need the sync feature. On the face of it it's a really important feature. Everything stored and sorted locally, watched statuses sorted, configurable encode settings to balance storage use and quality. Perfect. The moment finally comes round, I excitedly sift through my tv and movie collection with things to sync over to my tablet. I'm going to watch soooo much stuff, it's going to be great! Get to destination, "Unable to connect to server, Please select a different one" huh?.........Ah, "Local and Synced content, perfect".................."No servers found"......Rattle through all the menus, nope, nope, nope. You've got to be making GBS threads me, what and absolute waste of time. You need to be online?!?! Furious.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:36
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I’ve never had that problem when I sync things to my phone to watch on a plane.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:42
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You have to pick your device in the top left (your local iPad/iPhone/whatever). You were trying to watch a video like normal. You dingus.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:50
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Sync is super handy since I dump TV shows and movies on my kids tablets/phones at super low bitrate and don't have to bother dealing with Handbrake anymore Sync has annoyed me quite a few times where it just stopped transcoding the show 25% in and not telling me. Plex annoys me because one time I was trying to get some local playback going but it took forever trying to timeout dialing home before it acknowledged that I should be able to access my stuff locally. I think one time it kept me out completely until I force closed the app. I think there are some corner cases depending on the state of your app before you cut off your connection that they don't handle correctly
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Jan 29, 2018 21:53
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Tatsuta Age posted:You have to pick your device in the top left (your local iPad/iPhone/whatever). You were trying to watch a video like normal. You dingus. 100% not. Perhaps something bugged out on my tablet, but trust me I went through every single possible menu item 37 times minimum.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:53
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Yeah synced content definitely plays without a connection.
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Jan 29, 2018 21:55
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Synced content has been touch and go for me, honestly. It will get stuck transcoding and never make it to the device or it will not show up on the device even if the server says it synced, etc. I've had a few problems when I've tried to use it regularly. The weird issue I've been having lately is that the Windows 10 app doesn't ask for the pin on my admin account. I don't know if it just keeps it from when I typed it previously, but I'll go from completely shut down to launching the app and I'm in the PLEX admin account with no authorization, which is a little worrisome.
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Jan 29, 2018 22:08
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Going back to 4K discussion - is it possible to set up Plex to make/store an optimized version of 4K content at, say, 1080p / 20Mbps, and then use that as the source for further transcodes if a lower bitrate is requested?
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Jan 29, 2018 22:13
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IOwnCalculus posted:Going back to 4K discussion - is it possible to set up Plex to make/store an optimized version of 4K content at, say, 1080p / 20Mbps, and then use that as the source for further transcodes if a lower bitrate is requested? Probably not without renaming the optimized file it creates.
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Jan 30, 2018 00:40
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MeKeV posted:100% not. Perhaps something bugged out on my tablet, but trust me I went through every single possible menu item 37 times minimum. I had this happen once. Have no idea why.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:51
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It's doing it right now. No libraries showing in the side burger menu, just "Open Video File" and "Camera Roll". Sync status shows them all there. I'm wondering if it's Android "adoptable storage" related, as I just done a quick test on my phone without and SD card and that seems to be ok. I'll have to clear the data and start over.
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Jan 30, 2018 10:38
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