bmoses 9 Posted October 26, 2015 Share Posted October 26, 2015 I have emby setup for my parents at their house. We just switched out 2 of their HTPC with nexus players. after doing so they started having stuttering issues while watching Live TV and/or recorded TV. After doing some troubleshooting i determined that their desktop that is running the emby server software was having issues when running more than one transcode stream, and in some cases issues with just 1 transcode stream going. their desktop is an AMD A8-5500 CPU which is a quad core CPU that runs at 3.2Ghz (3.7Ghz turbo) and they have 8 gigs of ram. watching task manager for FFMPEG it was using an average of 85% CPU when watching a single recorded TV show and an average of 40% CPU when watching Live TV. If i started up a 2nd Live TV or recorded TV stream it would peg the CPU at 100% and one of the streams would start to stutter, usually the 2nd one started. In some cases they even had stuttering when only 1 recorded TV show was being watched while someone was browsing the internet on the desktop. is that CPU really that weak that it can't handle more than 1 transcode happening at the same time? or is there an issue somewhere else that is causing FFMPEG to use too much CPU? I'll have them run a test later tonight to get 2 transcode streams going and post the transcode log here, just wanted to get this out there to see if anyone had any ideas on it. thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14960 Posted October 26, 2015 Share Posted October 26, 2015 Do you have throttling enabled in the server transcode settings? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bmoses 9 Posted October 26, 2015 Author Share Posted October 26, 2015 Do you have throttling enabled in the server transcode settings? yep, cores is set to auto and throttling is enabled. the only setting i really changed there was the temporary transcode path, i just moved it to a different HDD from the OS drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14960 Posted October 26, 2015 Share Posted October 26, 2015 You could actually try turning throttling off. For Live TV streams it wouldn't help at all but, with real videos, it can actually work out better if the start times are staggered enough because the first item could be finished before the second one is requested. This will be highly dependent on the exact scenario each time though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bmoses 9 Posted October 26, 2015 Author Share Posted October 26, 2015 You could actually try turning throttling off. For Live TV streams it wouldn't help at all but, with real videos, it can actually work out better if the start times are staggered enough because the first item could be finished before the second one is requested. This will be highly dependent on the exact scenario each time though. yeah based on their viewing habits i don't think that will make much difference as i'm guessing that they will be watching most things around the same time. plus there was the one scenario where only 1 transcode was happening and it still stuttered because of other processes going on the desktop at the time. so does it sound like my answer is going to be new hardware? or would you like to take a look at a transcode log to see if anything is amiss? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bmoses 9 Posted October 26, 2015 Author Share Posted October 26, 2015 assuming "upgrade" is the answer, is what PLEX lists on their site for CPU recommendations for transcoding applicable to Emby? Very roughly speaking, for a single full-transcode of a video, the following PassMark scores are a good guideline for a requirement: 1080p/10Mbps: 2000 PassMark 720p/4Mbps: 1500 PassMark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bmoses 9 Posted October 26, 2015 Author Share Posted October 26, 2015 ok, another couple questions to add to the list i did some looking around/testing on a couple of things on my setup tonight. i was able to use an app called "instaTV" to direct stream live TV to the nexus player and it was using HW decoding. Other than not having sound because i didn't want to pay for it since i was just testing, it appeared to play OK with only some blocking here and there. on the recorded TV front i tested using the mediabrowser plug in for Kodi and played some recorded TV shows through that. They were also direct streaming to the nexus player. so my question is, someday down the road will emby be able to direct stream live and recorded TV to the nexus player as well? and if it is possible would the best guess be weeks, months, years down the road? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14960 Posted October 27, 2015 Share Posted October 27, 2015 so my question is, someday down the road will emby be able to direct stream live and recorded TV to the nexus player as well? and if it is possible would the best guess be weeks, months, years down the road? I hope so but I cannot tell you when as it will most likely be dependent on external software support. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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