Hi folks,

My question is about upgrading unraid to a more powerful CPU that can handle 1080p transcoding (maybe 2 at a time?) while staying low power when idle, or instead leveraging an always on Windows media center and running Plex on it instead.  Some background:

 

I built a small capacity unRaid server with lots of room to grow using Supermicro X7SLA-H-O Atom 330 with an AOC-SASLP-MV8 in a Norco 4224 and I'm running 5.0-rc16c on it.  It's acting as an SMB based media server where I store rips of all of our DVDs, mostly in AVI format.  Front ends are Media Center Extenders (XBOX360s) off of a Media Center PC that is a Dell XPS 420 (Intel Q9300 2.5GHz Core 2 Quad) running Windows 7 SP1.  I also have a few XBMC and a new Raspberry Pi front end to play with.  It's also general backup storage and a future cloud based backup connection point.

 

I have now started putting on higher end blue ray mkvs and other media which isn't easily digestible it seems by the extenders mostly.  I figured, no problem, let me throw on a transcoder and added Plex Media Server to the mix.  This is where I learned what an atom chip can and can't do.  Transcoding using Plex to the browser based Plex player is DOA with a 'buffering' every 3 seconds and the unraid server cpu pegged the entire time.  Makes sense.  Using Plex to a rich Plex client (mac/pc) allows it to stream the whole movie in 1080p with only 3 or 4 'buffering' interruptions on wifi, and clean while wired.  CPU in that case stays under 2% unless it's also doing something else.

 

I really like the low power draw for the unRaid box as I have it spinning down the drives but need to solve the alternate format question. 

Options:

1. My content doesn't change constantly so one option is to stay with the setup and just rerip what's handy and reencode what's not into a single format that will play everywhere while still keeping the highest res.  Doesn't seem to be such a format if I consider the media center extenders as they seem to be limited.  Also not being able to reduce the bandwidth for a wireless tablet means the experience on it will mostly suck if someone chooses to start a 1080p movie on it instead of a wired screen.

2. Upgrade the motherboard and CPU in the unRaid server and keep Plex running and transcoding as needed.  Plex seems like a slick setup.  Can anyone recommend a motherboard/cpu combo that will have the oomph to transcode 1080p easily (maybe even two at a time) and still be able to go into low power mode for the 12+ hours a day that no one is watching something actively.  (my wake on lan experience from different clients is horrible so I avoided that)

3. Could I run Plex Media Server on my Windows Media Center and point it to the unRaid box as it's file share?  They're off the same gigabit switch sitting side by side.  Would the Q9300 suffice to transcode while still managing my two HD tuners that it streams live tv from or records?

 

Would appreciate thoughts from folks who have done this or are in the same boat and have even tried things that didn't work.

 

Thanks for any assistance.

You could get some idea from Pauven's build here if you decide to go with different MB/CPU.

#1 is painful and requires a lot of extra work.  On-the-fly transcoding (Plex) is the obvious solution to this.

 

If you decide to go the #2 route, you can also look at my build (in sig) for a mobo/CPU setup that has plenty of oomph to transcode multiple simultaneous streams and is also still very low power (both at high utilization and idle).  The build thread has power consumption info obtained with a Kill-A-Watt.

 

Your #3 option is also possible.  The Q9300 in your WMC rig has enough horsepower to transcode at least one 1080p stream, probably even two.  Whether or not it has enough horsepower to handle the transcoding duties while still managing the HD Tuners I do not know, but suspect it would work fine.  All I can say is give it a try and see how it works. 

 

For comparison your Q9300 has a Passmark score of 3184, while my Core i3-3220T has a Passmark score of 3747.

First, a Q9300 should easily be able to handle recording a couple of shows while doing transcoding chores for Plex.    So the idea of running Plex there and just using UnRAID as your store is probably the simplest way to overcome your transcoding issues.    I don't use Plex, so I don't know what it's temporary file requirements might be, but be sure they're on the local system and not the UnRAID server ... otherwise the relatively slow writes on UnRAID would likely be a bottleneck.

 

If you should decide to upgrade, I can confirm that the little Asus board in dirtysanchez's build is a really neat little board.  While my small, low-power server is an Atom-based unit (X7SPA D525), I recently build another mini-ITX server for a friend using that Asus board and an i3-3225 and it's a GREAT unit with power-to-spare !!

Option 3 should be the easiest. With a Q9300 you should be easily handle 3 transcodes. My E6600 can do 2 transcodes to ios and android device and stream to a local htpc.