What I need for 50-100 Direct Play Plex Streams


alien4u

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Hello there.

I'm wondering which hardware would be needed to be able to Direct Stream 50-100 (Plex Media Server), Direct Play no Transcoding.

I'm thinking about a Dual Xeon setup with a dedicated 1GB Link and considering adding a Titan RTX in the future which theoretically can handle up to 48 hw trancodes.

I have my eyes in Xeon E-2288G or I could wait for the new W-1X ones coming this year.

 

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Serious?

 

Direct Stream? What content? SD, HD, 4K? Untouched content, re-encoded content? How many drives? What kind of drives?

 

My small library has 17Mbit/s avg. bandwidth for HD stuff. Multiply that by 100 and you will see where you end. You would stream 1,7Gbit/s thru your line.

 

For direct stream you don't need dual Xeons.

 

Please give some more details.

 

Edited by hawihoney
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1 minute ago, hawihoney said:

Serious?

 

Direct Stream? What content? SD, HD, 4K? Untouched content, re-encoded content? How many drives? What kind of drives?

 

My small library has 17Mbit/s avg. bandwidth for HD stuff. Multiply that by 100 and you will see where you end. You would stream 1,7Gbit/s thru your line.

 

Please give some more details.

 

@hawihoney 
- What I mean with direct streams is Plex Media Server Direct Play(forcing it to no transcode).
- Content would be mostly 1080P H264 5.1 (SRT subtitiles), No interest in 4K until I get the Titan RTX(But this is not a must for me).
- Client Side everyone will be using Plex Official Player.
- I have no interest in supporting Mobile devices or Browser Players.
- Drivers would be regular SATA Drivers a mix of 16TB and 8TB drivers(most likely Seagate Red).
- Server would be of course using unRaid.

Taking all this into consideration I will like to know which processor would be able to handle this load.

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My 2x E-2680 v2 don't even recognize Direct Play streams. IMHO the CPU isn't what you should worry about. 

 

I doubt that a single HDD can handle 100 reads in parallel at approx.  17Mbits/s each. That will stutter a lot. And If you use several HDDs it's pure luck what content on what drives is selected from your Users. Upstream bandwidth, harddisks, and never ending write requests to the Plex database are parts I would worry about.

 

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48 minutes ago, hawihoney said:

My 2x E-2680 v2 don't even recognize Direct Play streams. IMHO the CPU isn't what you should worry about. 

 

I doubt that a single HDD can handle 100 reads in parallel at approx.  17Mbits/s each. That will stutter a lot. And If you use several HDDs it's pure luck what content on what drives is selected from your Users. Upstream bandwidth, harddisks, and never ending write requests to the Plex database are parts I would worry about.

 

Good info here, so would be better many smaller HDDs(24 bays 2U-4U) rack case instead of a few big ones.(good point).

Then finds a way to evenly distribute content which could be done with some coding and statistics coming from something like Tautulli to determine geo data, plays trending and automatically re-organize content.

 

I don't expect to have 100 concurrent connections, that will be the worst/critical scenario.

 

Thanks.

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1 hour ago, BRiT said:

A main concern you're possibly overlooking is Upstream Bandwidth, especially Internet Upstream Bandwidth.

I will be doing colocation for this Server so I would have 1 or 2 - 1Gbps Down/Up Link if needed, not specially worry about that.

My concern is my i5-9400 with 5 Direct Play Streams is using about 20-30% of CPU.

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6 minutes ago, BRiT said:

Possibly far easier to move your library into Google Team Drive then hand out read-only accounts to that library so everyone can direct play from there.

I have a couple of issues with Google Team Drive:
- Content Privacy.
- Limit to 5TB(I think from a quick read)
- There is no native/multi platform player like Plex have.(Unless I'm missing something)

Thanks.

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36 minutes ago, alien4u said:

I will be doing colocation for this Server so I would have 1 or 2 - 1Gbps Down/Up Link if needed, not specially worry about that.

My concern is my i5-9400 with 5 Direct Play Streams is using about 20-30% of CPU.

Your configuration is broken if thats the case, directly play should use minimal cpu.

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54 minutes ago, alien4u said:

I have a couple of issues with Google Team Drive:
- Content Privacy.
- Limit to 5TB(I think from a quick read)
- There is no native/multi platform player like Plex have.(Unless I'm missing something)

Thanks.

 

- Encryption, but I suppose you mean limited scope of content to subscriber levels.

- No maximum size limits. See the thread Guide: How To Use Rclone To Mount Cloud Drives And Play Files

 

 

 

You may want to use RCLONE anyways on your colo server so you won't need massive drive storage.

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4 hours ago, BRiT said:

 

- Encryption, but I suppose you mean limited scope of content to subscriber levels.

- No maximum size limits. See the thread Guide: How To Use Rclone To Mount Cloud Drives And Play Files

You may want to use RCLONE anyways on your colo server so you won't need massive drive storage.

@BRiT 
Great guide, something I will need to setup and test to check out how it behave with multiple streams.

Thanks.

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