plantsandbinary Posted May 30, 2021 Share Posted May 30, 2021 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? Quote Link to comment
whipdancer Posted May 30, 2021 Share Posted May 30, 2021 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). Quote Link to comment
plantsandbinary Posted May 30, 2021 Author Share Posted May 30, 2021 (edited) 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 May 30, 2021 by plantsandbinary 1 Quote Link to comment
Lolight Posted May 31, 2021 Share Posted May 31, 2021 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. Quote Link to comment
plantsandbinary Posted July 28, 2021 Author Share Posted July 28, 2021 I'm pretty sure the shield was overheating. The non-pro version of the shield has really terrible cooling. I moved it to a bit more of a cooler area and generally it has performed pretty well. In addition to this, I think having subtitles (of any kind) just makes Emby/Jellyfin et al. freak out. Quote Link to comment
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