RichB

Fyi, I edited original post to correct possible /dev/dri parameter

You must use beta which requires plexpass, and only the official plex docker. Do you have all of that?

This thread is specifically for amd which does not have quicksync at all and leveraging GPU to hw transcode can be a benefit vs cpu transcode. Intel quicksync capability across their cpu generations is a completely different topic.

Must be plex official docker

Yes, requires plex pass unfortunately. I got lifetime on sale 5-10 years ago for $75, worth it to me. If you plan on using plex long term, worth supporting the devs and new features. Good luck

Please reply here with any insights you gained to best leverage the GPU, thx

Almost everyone agrees that Intel quicksync is better for a standard PMS as it seems to scale better for multiple concurrent streams. I just got a great deal on an amd based mini pc to play with

Just checking in on games/game play side of the gaming server question here...Some cool ones I've started to zero in on include: Atlas (pirate, first person survival, building, exploring with multiplayer capability), Mindustry, Satisfactory, but still looking. Myst like first person with puzzles vs. combat centric is preferred. Bringing in the multiplayer coop side, maybe quests and battles from time to time would be ok, but could play solo maybe with NPC AI squad? The intent is for a private server, no interest in advanced dbags constantly killing and stealing or destroying things. Thanks all

Been wondering about PokerTH, an opensource poker game. Not having docker specific experience, does this translate well into a good self hosted game server app here? I searched and coudn't find anything related to a traditional playing card game server. Thanks for all your work here!

Hope the lounge is appropriate place for this post, if not just let me know and apologies... I've just setup unraid and am exploring all it can do. Interested in learning about and trying a self hosted game server and see a few options in CA apps. Wondering if docker approach is best for my setup given it's a mini pc vs. a VM? My setup: I have an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H mini pc (8core, 16 thread, 3.2 to 4.4Ghz) with integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics (2Gb memory I think, 8 graphics cores?); 64Gb ram ddr4; zfs array, 1 parity drive, cache pool: 1 - 2Tb nvme cache & with 1 - 2Tb Samsung ssd I want to try to self host a gaming server for solo play and maybe infrequent friends joining sometimes, then maybe they don't for a while but game still keeps moving forward smoothly playing solo. Ideally, they can rejoin game later when they want and still be part of my group and hop into where I'm at. I like puzzle games mostly, explore then solve and also casual tower defense and maybe some building/exploring/surviving but not just an intense shoot em up, weapons fest. Not sure what games like this come to anyones mind. I'm not a big gamer so don't have much recent background. I really liked Myst series back in the day. Not into virtual RPG board games. Great options would be easy install/setup, some control to make things easier at beginning like enemies, attacks, resources so solo isn't a slaughter or grind while I figure it out. Looking for your success stories on unraid and good matches based on above. Thanks in advance! I really appreciate the community here

Follow up: TLDR - The Ryzen 7 5800H mini pc can run ~4 1080p HW TC's before choking(higher bit rate 1080p original down to 8gbps, not 4k tc). 10+ direct play streams. CPU was the constraint on the HW TC count, not GPU. If you really need to do many HW TC's, go with Intel gen 12+(with quicksync) and 16 to 32Gb RAM. You can get away with gen 8+ as well and may find better deals. Good luck. I was able to fire up a bunch of streams to test out performance informally. Browser was on same local network, chrome latest version. Navigated in each window to Plex UI, picked a movie that had a rate/quality higher than 1080p 8mbps, forced to 1080p, 8mbps. Was able to get up to 4 hardware transcodes going before trying to fire up the 5th failed. Did not see any perceptible buffering, but didn't run for that long. GPU got up to about 20-30% max, so it was CPU constrained I think. CPU was showing a bunch of red and orange with overall % at 70%+ and close to 100 at times. Another factor to CPU load was new unraid build was creating parity disk and seeing s lot of IOwait on cpu? I also have around 20 dockers running and 1 VM that was off at the time, so this mini pc can handle a lot. I also tried to open a bunch in direct play to see how many streams I could get. I got close to 10 1080p streams and had to get back to work. For me, this inexpensive $330 mini pc(w/32gb ram and 1Tb nvme (gen 3) was a great little home lab pc to try things out. PS: Don't tell the fanatics, but I got a usb 3 (gen 1) 8 bay Syba DAS enclosure and am running the full array from it with smart data working and no drops or errors so far. Fingers crossed. I had 2 4bay DAS enclosures, but the drive identification in the array slots was getting confused and think splitting across usb controllers was the issue. So far no problem with that. We shall see. Good luck all.

Well, I've found out that there are a multitude of potential issues in using unraid with multiple USB DAS ensclosures, so my little homelab has to do some growing up it seems. I have one more trick up my sleeve and that's an 8 bay Syba USB3 DAS enclosure before I rule it out altogether. Nice thing about this one is it is physically switched so no soft sync on power through USB to PC. I'll set this as solution out to let others see what a mess multiple USB enclosures can be. Will post follow ups if my 8 bay enclosure does what I want. Thx to those who replied

Follow up weirdness and don't poke at me for my homelab build...TLDR : I think the USB3 DAS enclosures are confusing the ids/drives unraid sees across two enslosures. 1 DAS works fine and UI acts normal with array disk assignments. I have a mini PC with two 4 bay USB3 DAS enclosures to leverage existing stuff and try this out. So I build with the first 4 bay and the 4 qty 4tb drives. Goes nicely. I decide to grab the 2nd DAS enclosure and drives. Drop one 4Tb parity drive in first DAS/Array. Plug in the 2nd DAS and migrate all the data to the shares on the 3 drive/no parity array. I also backup key files onto another external WD 4Tb usb drive just in case. Now I'm ready to format the old drives which were NTFS and add them to the array. Here's where the weirdness begins. If I try to add drives from the original array to the new array setup, the UI gets wonky. Won't let me add some of the original 4Tb's into the array. When I unplug the 2nd DAS, all of the larger drives I migrated from drop of course and magically all 4 of the 4Tb drives in the 1st DAS get recognized without an issue. The moment the 2nd DAS gets plugged in the UI doesn't allow me to add some of the 4Tb's to the array. I think this is getting into USB weirdness zone. Any ideas on how to make this work? Since both DAS are identical, could some id's be identical causing unraid to get confused on drive ID's? Would a usb hub in front of one help make unique? Please don't make fun of this goofiness. I'm trying to save some money versus buying a whole new build for $$$. Thx for any advice and sorry for the long story.

I'm new to ZFS and unraid so don't know the nuances. I just want to add the 3 Tb drives that were in the functioning array back in with the new drives. They were each formatted individually as ZFS. The drive array UI slots will not let me select the drives I want into each slot. It's forcing a new 8Tb in Disk 1 slot and for some of the existing drives from former array it won't let me add in any slot. Sorry, I'm confused

FYI, I'm trying to add back the original and 'new' drives in the array devices section and the UI is not letting me add some or forcing the 8Tb's into slots. Really weird behavior. Did I break the array? Do I have to create a new 1 drive array and then do another new config not saving any drive assignments or cache only? This feels really weird behavior and confusing