Off the shelf emby server/home pc solution

[<mike> 1]

After what must be almost 10 years of first Mediaportal and then XBMC/Kodi I recently discovered Emby while trying to work out some issues with Kodi where certain shows weren't being detected.

 

I've installed Emby on our old laptop that doubles as our home pc (although admittedly with iPads these days we rarely find ourselves sitting down at the laptop unless it is to type out a word document of something).    

 

I was amazed how well emby worked both integrating into Kodi and as a standalone app on the FireTV. Now unfortunately our old laptop struggles with the added pressure of Emby running as a server so I need to look into alternatives. We would need something that comfortably serve perhaps 2 or 3 TV's with FireTV's and possibly a couple of iPads. Offsite would only be a long term goal.

 

I don't have much spare time these days with a couple of young kids so had been looking at some of the all in one pc's. Problem is I don't know what would be powerful enough to meet our requirements?   I had been considering a 2011+ Mac Mini but yesterday Amazon had a sale on the ASUS VM42-S075V Celeron 2957U (Haswell-R) for only $169 with Windows. 

 

Does anyone have any experience with these all in one solutions? Would love to build something but just don't have the time or the money so looking for the simplest solution. Would like to be able to still use the unit as our home pc for very light usage as needed.

 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. (and apologies if this is the wrong sub forum)

Edited December 2, 2015 by <mike>

[Logos302 86]

The problem with answer the question is we don't know what format you media is in.  And the reason I ask is when it comes to transcoding you need more then when the media is in a format that the device that your using can play directly.  I use an AMD A6-5000 (not at home so it might actually be slower) and it seems to be fine with one IPAD, and my MediaPC.  The media pc does not do any transcoding so it's just the IPAD.   

[<mike> 1]

Most of the media is tv shows in 720p MKV format (some older stuff in avi) (not sure if you need more technical details just the standard 'downloaded' stuff?)

 

Most Movies are 1080p mkv downloads between 4.7gb & 12gb. Again not sure if I need to be more technical but just the usual downloaded stuff?

 

We have one fire tv box, two fire tv sticks and a couple of iPads. It would be very rare that more than a couple of devices would be used at once. I would like to upgrade to a new Apple TV at some stage (probably the release of an Emby app would lead me to that)

 

If I need to be more technical let me know , I'll look when I am at home.

 

Thanks so much for the quick reply.

[legallink 187]

If you are open to transcoding most of your media into mp4s ahead of time, you don't have to have a very powerful machine.

[<mike> 1]

You know this is something I have actually thought about and that might make more sense moving forward. Could be a big job initially but something to think about. Thanks for the idea.

[supermau 37]

If you don't need trancoding, any low budget box will do fine, if for whatever reason you need transcoding I would suggest something with an Intel processor that supports "Quick Sync" which Emby is supporting as far as I know, I think it is still experimental but I am sure it's going places

 

The important thing about your media collection is not so much the container (mkv, mp4, avi, webm) but the codecs inside it (H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), OGG Theora (VP3) and WebM (VP8)). AVI can contain about a million different video and audio formats!

 

I would suggest testing your media with your clients (iPad, FireTV, etc...) and see if they direct play or transcode the media. If they are able to direct play the media you are good to go, if for whatever reason they don't you would need to transcode or change containers and continue testing.

 

Before changing containers from mkv to mp4, try just renaming your media's extension from mkv to mp4, it worked for me to play without transcoding in Android Chrome, Chrome desktop and Emby for android.

 

You can change containers fairly easily without transcoding the streams inside:

ffmpeg -i my-movie.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy my-movie.mp4

[<mike> 1]

Yeah the mkv renaming trick worked for the firetv but still needs transcoding on iPad and iPhones it seems. Will have to look further into the best settings for these devices. Tried a couple of settings in MP4 tools just have to work out what works best consistently.

 

Thanks for all the help so far.

[supermau 37]

Are you using Emby iOS app? have you tried safari, chrome and the app? Please share your findings... My mom will be using my server and she has an iPad, I don want to be needing any transcoding...

[Deathsquirrel 741]

If the only problem is the container then that's really just a re-mux, not a transcode.  The CPU use is higher than zero but it's still pretty low.

 

I don't download media but from my understanding most everyone is sharing h264 video at fairly moderate bit rates with aac or DD sound.  Most any playback device is likely to handle that without transcoding much, if any of it.

 

I personally prefer to split the server out into a separate chassis that can handle lots of drives, but if I were going all in one with the storage handled externally, I'd look at an i5 nuc or similar box to double as a server and htpc client.

[ronvp 92]

For free batch recode your MKV's to MP4 (or almost any other format), try XMedia Recode (http://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/). It can do just a straight stream copy and/or recode both audio and video.