What kind of setup would you need if you want to enable 30 to 40 clients to stream from Unraid?

[jang430]

Assuming you setup a system, with Sabnzbd, Sonarr, Deluge, Radarr, and allow 30 to 40 users to stream TV and shows from it via Raspberry pi or Tablet.  What kind of hardware/ share setup will be needed to allow all 30 to 40 users to stream from Unraid, assuming they all "just happen" to watch the same show  ?  This is highly unlikely, but want to understand what needs to be done on the hardware side to accommodate such a setup.  If the show is new, then this is definitely possible.

[BRiT]

It all depends ... if all clients need the server to transcode or if no clients need the server to transcode.

 

Its far easier to support better clients that do not need server-side transcoding.

[JonathanM]

If you are talking about remote clients not on the LAN, you are going to need a rather large internet connection. I suspect symmetric 1GB would be a bare minimum, and the router had better have some serious power as well.

[jang430]

Ok, further clarification. On the same network. No transcode needed.

[bastl]

@jang430 Lets do some quick math I guess. Take the bitrate of a video. Lets say 

6000kbit/s * 40 users = 240.000kbit/s / 1000 = 240mbit/s / 8 = 30MB/s

The bitrate isn't constant for most videos and can jump up and down. Also you have to keep in mind depending on which audio format is streamed that also can ad an significant portion on top + you have ad some overhead as well. Now you have to asked yourself can your storage provide that read speed and is your network capable of transmitting that amount of data. 

[jang430]

It is hypothetical, though always imagined what kind of setup airplane uses. So was thinking how can we achieve something like that. If the movie stays on one drive, being accessed at the same time by different people, is it possible. Say 1080p playback?

[bastl]

Broadcasting and "downloading" are 2 different things. Playing a video from a network share is not a broadcast. A broadcast is a constant stream send out over whatever media (cable, wifi whatever). In this case you have only 1 file access, thats how cable tv, radio and i guess also most systems in airplanes work.

 

The resolution basically doesn't matter if no encoding is involved. If the server has to reencode the video first before sending out, your CPU/GPU becomes the next important factor. Can it handle 40 parallel encoding sessions? For higher resolutions you need higher bitrates to have the same video quality. If you don't increase the bitrate and only the resolution the quality will getting worse and worse and the file size will kinda stay the same. The bitrate is an indicator how many informations can be stored for a specified time interval. 6000 bits per second. 

Edited April 10, 2019 by bastl

[ijuarez]

Jason from the bite my bits youtube has a pretty beefy setup and depending on what he is testing he gets between 7 and 9 streams.

[kizer]

Yep on my old little AMD Sempron 140 which had a CPU BenchMark of 700 I was able to serve up 5 Streams of 720 using Kodi with no Transcoding simply SMB file sharing.

 

With my current setup using my Xeon QuadCore CPU BenchMark of 7000 I can easily SMB share multiple 1080's and a couple of Transcoding Plex Streams at the same time.

 

30 to 40? That I couldn't tell you. Never had a reason/chance to push anything that far.

[jang430]

@ijuarez, will check it out  

 

@kizer, what if all of them are the same shows on the same drive?  Let's say, a popular movie just came up?

[trurl]

46 minutes ago, jang430 said:

what if all of them are the same shows on the same drive?

Are they all going to want the ability to pause, rewind, etc independent of each other?

[jang430]

Independent.  Again, this is just hypothetical.  No need to be very specific about it  .  Just thinking if our beloved Unraid is capable to handle such a use case scenario.

 

 

[kizer]

Well when I did my Experiment many years ago I played Ratatouille(720) on all 5 devices at the same time. Keep in mind I was only file sharing via SMB using Kodi aka XBMC as the player and had zero issues. 

 

Then I tried different videos on all of my devices. 

 

Every device played, paused, FF and Rewind just fine on all content in both occasions. 

 

Today wirh my current setup I probably could do a lot more via SMB but I’ve gone to Plex and some devices such as Tablets and what not need Transcoding so I have no idea. 

 

Id say as long as the Player does the Transcoding Id imagine you could get a lot of streams as long as your servers NIC could handle it. However if you use something like Plex and which requires Transcoding on “some” devices it’s going to seriously impact the amount of streams. Unless of course you are say using 30 AppleTvs and have all your videos encoded for them it would be interesting to see how far you could push it. 

[kizer]

Now that I think of it Plex is slowly trying to roll out a new Player in the Apple TV that acts more like the player in the Xbox One. Client side Trans-coding or I should say a more flexible player that actually doesn't require a specific codec for Audio or Video like they have in the past and might act more like a SMB stream. I haven't enabled it and played with it much, but I should to see how well it performs.

 

I'll try it this weekend and play the same video on both of my AppleTV's forcing Trans-coding on the Server and then switch to the "in Development player" of Plex and see how much resources it uses on the Server side. Do a little side by side weekend research.

[laryan]

I wanted to add my experience. I run both Plex for external viewers and Kodi for internal. I have 20+ external users and 4 internal devices. Typically I have 5-6 external users and only 1 or 2 internal running in parallel. The Plex users use varies devices, iPads, iPhones, Roku, Firesticks, etc. I've seen as many as 8 external and 2 internal running all at the same time (typical Friday and Saturday night) without any issues. I've got my Plex box tuned pretty well and my users don't see any buffering. I'm sure with my system I could have more parallel users, maybe 10-12.

[Frank1940]

Nobody has even asked how many of these streams are going to distributed using Wireless.  While not an Unraid issue directly, it is still a very important consideration when considering this type of a scenario!  It could easily require a network with three (or more) wireless AP's.  

[ijuarez]

Nobody has even asked how many of these streams are going to distributed using Wireless.  While not an Unraid issue directly, it is still a very important consideration when considering this type of a scenario!  It could easily require a network with three (or more) wireless AP's.  

I'm sure a unifi AP here and there would be the ticket

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