Building a decent size media storage server

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aegdaien

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spronk_sl said:
i may be wrong, but doesn't Plex transcode files? ie translate mkv source into mpeg2 streams for older devices. If so, that is pretty terrible and you are losing video/audio quality. Something you should definitely see, maybe play plex shares with videolan or something that lets you see the exact stream quality and settings, and compare that to the source MKV file.
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Short answer: It depends on the client that you're streaming to, but generally no, any h.264 video stream is not transcoded unless your network isn't capable of streaming the bitrate of the source file.

Long answer: The Plex transoder can demux MKV files on the fly and transcode only the parts that need to be. Typically this is the audio portion, unless your client device supports both AC3 and DTS. For instance - I typically stream to a Logitech Revue which supports AC3 (Dolby Digital), but not DTS. So any of my MKVs with DTS are transcoded in real-time to AC3, but the h.264 video is left untouched. The caveat to that is that Android-based clients don't support subtitles so if you have them as a separate file in the MKV (most Usenet/Torrented MKVs are this way) and select the subtitles, the video has to be transcoded but I'm not certain what format it gets transcoded to.

FWIW, I didn't notice any quality difference when I selected subtitles for Star Wars I/II/IV/VI and streamed them vs leaving the alien dialogue off so that Plex played it without transcoding the video. These are from the blu-ray box set that I personally ripped from my collection without any compression (~35GB MKVs). I can dig through the Plex server log to see what it's being transcoded to, but since the quality didn't noticeably change it didn't bother me.

Aychamo - Regarding your question about shares, Synology is everything that a 'dumb' NAS is (zfs, unRAID, etc) plus a front-end web GUI so it's capable of any type of share those systems are plus the extra fluff. I guess QNAP would be it's direct competitor, but from my understanding the GUI is nicer on Synology and there's more installation packages available for different programs like Plex and SABnzbd.
 
Zodiac

Zodiac

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aychamo, use some of those obamacare doctor bucks and just buysomething already built(price is without drives btw) to slap on your already awesome home rack.

The Cleverbox Rackmount 24 (4U Rackmount) provides up to96 TBof protected storage for all digital media formats and backup data. This 4U Rackmount server is based on the 4224 4U Rackmount chassis. This server features a high quality rackmount design for easy integration into your server rack.
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T

The Master

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spronk_sl said:
Also don't get into the mindset that you are going to create an ultimate video library with a billion shows and videos, the reality is that too much content is overwhelming. I have a 12TB media array and I only share a few folders out of it, and constantly prune shit. My wife wants 10-15 choices to watch, not fucking 2000 like netflix. I delete 99% of the movies I see because they are pretty shitty, in the past 10 years maybe 2 dozen movies are worth rewatching.

Likewise, use the internet as your storage device. I like Rome, have seen it twice, but deleted it because fuck it, I can just redownload the torrent (and I own the bluray) if I feel the need to watch it again. There is no point whatsoever in hoarding every single bluray and TV show and movie you want, just watch and purge.
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Personally my home NAS is primarily taken up by video games. I just like the idea that I have every video game for basically every console that is currently emulatable. Between that and an enormous music collection...

I don't keep shows or movies at all.
 
Moonball

Moonball

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Draegan_sl said:
I just bought a 4 Bay QNAP server and 4x3TB Seagate drives and it's beastly. Set up in RAID5 too.

QNAP: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...erface for PLEX. [ATTACH=full]37078[/ATTACH]
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Aychamo BanBan

Aychamo BanBan

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I have Plex server running on my home server too. I don't use it for streaming around the house though, for that I use iTunes/AppleTV. If AppleTV ever allows apps, I'm sure the Plex app would be great. Instead, I just use Plex for streaming to my iPad/iPhone when I'm at work and have some down time and want to watch something that I have back home. It's pretty cool, I can basically stream any of my hundreds of movies or TV shows to anywhere in the world.
 
Eomer

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So if I have a Qnap TS-439 on my home network, what's the best/easiest/simplest way to access media stored on it through my Nexus 10? Mostly concerned about TV shows and movies I downloaded through torrents.
 
K

Kedwyn

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Eomer_sl said:
So if I have a Qnap TS-439 on my home network, what's the best/easiest/simplest way to access media stored on it through my Nexus 10? Mostly concerned about TV shows and movies I downloaded through torrents.
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If running plex then download the plex app or you can use Imeadiashare lite or the plethora of other free DLNA compatible programs. You may also want mx player depending on format.
 
Eomer

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I don't even really know what Plex is. Will the QNAP run that? I don't want to have to leave my desktop or HTPC on, I want to feed/stream media directly from the Qnap to the Nexus.

I've downloaded MX Player since the built in player wouldn't play any of my media, and it seems to work alright if I drop the files on to the Nexus. But it would be nice to not have to actually plug it in to a computer and copy the files over manually.
 
Tripamang

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This is my setup, it's been going strong for about five years so far and it's gone through a few different generation of drives without issue.

Case: 4U 20 Drive Casehttp://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=48...nologies%20Inc.
I just have a random mATX motherboard with a cheap AMD APU for transcoding. Just make sure it has at least two free PCIe slots (1x+) in order have add in SAS cards for adding more drives. (4 drives from the motherboard, 16 drives from from two add in cards). You can get Sata->SAS break out cables to connect the motherboard to the SAS backplane.

I run Ubuntu 64Bit server edition as the server and I use FlexRaid (http://www.flexraid.com/) for my disk management. It offers a ton of advantages over raid5, I think it's highly comparable to FreeNAS without all the license limitations. The only limitation with it is that the largest drive (by either combination of drives or a single drive) has to be the parity drive. Since it's not a true RAID it'll power down any of your drives that don't need to spin, and if too many drives fail to do a recovery you still have all the data on the surviving drives, you just lose whatever was on the failed disks. It also has a feature to create a giant disk out of all the sub disks and you can just reference the big disk and not have to worry about how much free space is on each drive.

I run the Plex server on top of this and it serves up to all the devices in my house without issue and doesn't consume much power at all when it isn't in use.
 
Alkorin

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How is FlexRAID for performance? Looking at it right now and I'm kinda wondering why I'm not using this instead of Windows RAID.
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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I'm not sure what kind of penalty there is for running it in real time, but I run it in snapshot mode, so at 3am every night calculates parity. If a drive were to fail I'd only lose whatever I had added to the raid since the last parity was calculated. The parity calculation is pretty good for incremental data, it'll take maybe a minute or two to recalculate if I had 10-20gigs of new data.

Since it sits on top of the file system to do it's work you don't get any sort of performance improvement over transferring from a single drive.
 
A

a_skeleton_03

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Eomer_sl said:
I don't even really know what Plex is. Will the QNAP run that? I don't want to have to leave my desktop or HTPC on, I want to feed/stream media directly from the Qnap to the Nexus.

I've downloaded MX Player since the built in player wouldn't play any of my media, and it seems to work alright if I drop the files on to the Nexus. But it would be nice to not have to actually plug it in to a computer and copy the files over manually.
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http://www.plexapp.com/getplex/<-- click NAS Appliances and the QNAP version shows up, not sure if there are any issues with it but I doubt there are, I can't reccomend plex enough, it has changed my life for the better
 
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a_skeleton_03

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Tripamang_sl said:
Do you find it doesn't handle large collections well? It has a tendency to chug on my system pretty hard.. I can't even open the web interface at all.
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I have 3 TB of media and no chugging at all, runs like a champ. However comma comma pause for effect I have it running on a beast of a PC with all of it's cache etc on the SSD and the media on a raid 0 made up of 3 disks and not a NAS so YMMV.
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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Bridge Burner_sl said:
I have 3 TB of media and no chugging at all, runs like a champ. However comma comma pause for effect I have it running on a beast of a PC with all of it's cache etc on the SSD and the media on a raid 0 made up of 3 disks and not a NAS so YMMV.
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I should say my issue isn't so much on the plex server, as much as the client. When browsing my movie collection it chugs like mad, television isn't so bad. I have quite a bit more data than that, so it might just not be designed for what I'm throwing at it. It's still useful, just slow.. I generally don't use it but it's nice for guests who can't be bothered to browse file systems.
 
Alkorin

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Tripamang_sl said:
I'm not sure what kind of penalty there is for running it in real time, but I run it in snapshot mode, so at 3am every night calculates parity. If a drive were to fail I'd only lose whatever I had added to the raid since the last parity was calculated. The parity calculation is pretty good for incremental data, it'll take maybe a minute or two to recalculate if I had 10-20gigs of new data.

Since it sits on top of the file system to do it's work you don't get any sort of performance improvement over transferring from a single drive.
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Sounds interesting. I might give this a try when I migrate my server to Windows 2012. The overhead of software RAID 5 is fairly horrible, and when the server crashes (it happens from time to time) the entire RAID has to re-sync, which takes way too long. Thanks for mentioning this.
 
Tripamang

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Alkorin_sl said:
Sounds interesting. I might give this a try when I migrate my server to Windows 2012. The overhead of software RAID 5 is fairly horrible, and when the server crashes (it happens from time to time) the entire RAID has to re-sync, which takes way too long. Thanks for mentioning this.
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I was running software Raid 5 on linux and it just became more and more frustrating as time went on. I had one situation where a power outage caused the drive raid signature on the drives to become corrupt. I hadn't written down what I had chosen for the drive order+bit size etc, so I had to write a script to test a whackload of combinations till I found one that would restore with my data. I researched for awhile after that and FreeNAS was too restrictive with what I could use the box for, and FlexRaid was just the perfect product for what I wanted. I've recovered from three dead drives so far with no issue, I can't recommend it enough.
 
Alkorin

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Tripamang_sl said:
I've recovered from three dead drives so far with no issue, I can't recommend it enough.
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Cool. It's going to take quite a while to migrate all of my data (~9TB) to FlexRaid from Windows RAID (I'll have to copy it all back on to the storage pool once I delete the RAID and create a storage pool), but it sounds like since most of my data is movies/TV, snapshot is the ideal way to go anyway. I don't have any issues with playing ~30GB files on the media box I have even with Windows RAID, but the rebuilding thing is very aggravating.
 
A

aegdaien

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Eomer_sl said:
Thanks, will give it a shot.
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If you find performance on the QNAP sluggish (you will because of the low end processor on most NAS devices), I suggest installing the Plex server on a desktop if you have one and just point the folders to your QNAP. That way when the Plex server has to transcode a file the beefier computer will handle it.
 
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