Need a 4K streaming capable setup. Want to upgrade from HP Microserver Gen8


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I've got this current HTPC machine which is now getting quite old and is struggling with playing the latest UHD content. Namely it's struggling connected up to my Nvidia Shield playing formats like HEVC HDR 10Bit UHD movies with DTS/AC3 audio. I'm getting intermittent stutters and at times the stream almost cuts out completely and my TV flashes the input/description bar at the top whilst playing.

 

Btw yes that is the latest BIOS sadly:

 

Model: Custom
M/B: Version - s/n:
BIOS: HP Version J06. Dated: 04/04/2019
CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1265L @ 2.40GHz
HVM: Enabled
IOMMU: Enabled
Cache: 128 KiB, 1 MB, 8 MB
Memory: 16 GiB DDR3 Single-bit ECC (max. installable capacity 16 GiB)
Network: bond0: fault-tolerance (active-backup), mtu 1500
 eth0: 1000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500
 eth1: 1000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500
Kernel: Linux 5.10.28-Unraid x86_64

 

Running with the following drives:

 

Array Devices
Device	Identification	Temp.	Reads	Writes	Errors	FS	Size	Used	Free	View
Parity	WDC_WD40EFRX-68N32N0_WD-WCC********* - 4 TB (sdb)	38 C	55,951	311,267	0	
Disk 1	WDC_WD40EFRX-68N32N0_WD-WCC********* - 4 TB (sde)	36 C	237,971	81,967	0	xfs	4 TB	
2.77 TB
	1.23 TB	[Browse /mnt/disk1]
Disk 2	WDC_WD40EFRX-68N32N0_WD-WCC********* - 4 TB (sdd)	37 C	141,606	221,313	0	xfs	4 TB	
2.81 TB
	1.19 TB	[Browse /mnt/disk2]
Disk 3	TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_********* - 3 TB (sdc)	41 C	469,423	15,504	0	xfs	3 TB	
1.77 TB
	1.23 TB	[Browse /mnt/disk3]
	Array of four devices	38 C	904,951	630,051	0		11 TB	
7.34 TB
	3.65 TB	
Pool Devices
Device	Identification	Temp.	Reads	Writes	Errors	FS	Size	Used	Free	View
Cache	Samsung_SSD_850_EVO_250GB_S3R********* - 250 GB (sdf)	41 C	155,702	18,353	0	btrfs	250 GB	
38.4 GB
	210 GB

 

The amount of storage I have is generally fine. However, the system just doesn't have the read speeds I need to comfortably watch 4K video on my Sony Bravia UHD TV. It's running a dual Gig LAN and connected via Ethernet to my ASUS RT-AX88U Router, which is connected via Ethernet to my Nvidia Shield. Everything is connected via Ethernet. I've tried with Kodi, Emby4Kodi, Emby directly, Jellyfin and even Plex. High bitrate 4K content is just often struggling.

 

I'm looking to upgrade to something that's capable of obviously running UNRAID. I'm not sure about swapping out the 3 WD Red drives I have and the single Toshiba and replacing them all with SSDs. If I got standard 2TB SSDs I'd be looking at literally 800€ for only 6TB of SSD storage + a parity drive. So I wanted to ask what people's recommendations were here before I threw down that kind of money as I could buy an entire new server station for that.

 

I looked at the "new" Xenon Microserver Gen10+ models but they look pretty garbage. No hyper-threading at all. Even the older ones with the 6-core AMD Opterons from back in 2012 look to be more powerful.

 

What are people using to play their UHD content these days?

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6 minutes ago, plantsandbinary said:

What are people using to play their UHD content these days?

 

NVidia Shield, Roku+, Apple TV.

Using Plex, I rarely encounter any issues playing back UHD source anymore because my device is what does the decoding - not my server.  My server is able to just stream the file directly in most cases.   The only thing that seems to give me a headache are the HD sound tracks (because the server has to transcode those) and subtitles (again, forces transcoding).

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My shield direct plays absolutely everything. What hardware are you actually using to store the files though? I guess the stuff in your signature, which I think is quite a bit more powerful than mine (at least the CPU is). I'm not transcoding anything, and the shield should decode everything flawlessly. I seem to get the problem more often with subtitles, even if they are just basic .srt format. Though it does also happen without them. When I use Emby sometimes i get the error "Read speeds are not high enough to play this format natively".

 

If I use Plex it's a nightmare. It just crashes half the time and I don't even recognise Plex these days because it's basically spyware.

Edited by plantsandbinary
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12 hours ago, plantsandbinary said:

 

However, the system just doesn't have the read speeds I need to comfortably watch 4K video on my Sony Bravia UHD TV. It's running a dual Gig LAN and connected via Ethernet to my ASUS RT-AX88U Router, which is connected via Ethernet to my Nvidia Shield. Everything is connected via Ethernet.

What are people using to play their UHD content these days?

It sounds like you have some abnormal bottle necking on your network that create throughput problems.

The process of streaming UHD content without the on the fly trans-coding is not hardware intensive.

The 4K HDR videos don't even saturate the 100Mbit network.

Your hardware should easily handle those files while serving to 1Gbit trans coding devices, such as your Nvidia Shield.

 

 

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