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docoon
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docoon

Hello, guys my knwlodge with plex and emby is very basic, so treat me as a child by now...

 

I've started a private server to me and brother (who is in the other side of the country), I thought of that because I have some drivers with 187 TB of movies/series/docs ... (some of the TB are games .. so) But... since I started my plex server using a virtual mounted driver, I notice that my brother eats my cpu to watch it, that's because of the transcoder,

 

I know I could disable it, but that would have problems with some codecs and some subtitles... as far as I understood.

 

So my question is simple, is there a way to set my plex//emby ->> (i'm going to migrate to emby, that's why i'm searching here) to let the user (my brother) consume his own cpu/gpu to transcode the movie he wants? Or it has to be the server the only thing that can transcode...

 

Excuse my ignorance, i'm new at this.

 

If there's a way, point me the direction

@@cayars

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Those are good questions.  I too have a very large collection probably twice the size of what you reference.  One thing I do on my system is convert all movies to MP4/H264 or MKV/HEVC with a default audio track of AAC, then any other audio tracks.  That pretty much makes them playable on any client I use EXCEPT if bandwidth is an issue.

 

If my server needs to transcode then it's done in hardware which relieves the CPU of doing the work.  Emby is much better at this than Plex.

 

The one things that can have more benefit than anything else is to choose client/hardware that can play next to anything.  For example a Shield TV while usually twice the cost of cheap boxes will play most things you throw at it so the server never needs to transcode the files (except bandwidth reasons).  So with only you and your brother using the system I'd suggest getting robust hardware like the Shield TV (or other Android TV devices) that can play most if not all the formats.

 

Next is to enable hardware transcoding on your server assuming you have the hardware to support it which .  If not a used nVidia video card will easily handle a couple of streams no problem. If you go this route post here for help with selection of new or used video cards to use.  Most new computers will support hardware transcoding out of the box!

 

What you want to do is find out WHY your videos are transcoding when your brother plays them.  You can tell from the dashboard what is being transcoded (ie video, audio, subs) and then can often just guess why (bit rate was really high) or can of course dive in and read the transcode log for the specific file.  If you need help understanding the logs, just ask here.

 

Carlo

 

PS let us know if you have more questions or if I didn't fully answer something.

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docoon

Thank you for your kindness, I see your point and that's what i will do.

 

ps: I've already thought of that shield tv from nvidia, but its too expensive for my pocket, if nvidia could accept one kidney I would get 2 of those shields

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You may want to check out 

Xiaomi Mi Box S 4K HDR Android TV

as well as these are worth the money.  Same Emby UI as Shield TV for Emby.  It's like a Shield TV lite as it doesn't have the hardware encoding built in which really doesn't matter much.  You can get 3 to 4 of these for the cost of one Shield TV.

 

$54.99 at Walmart

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Xiaomi-Mi-Box-S-4K-HDR-Android-TV-with-Google-Assistant-Remote-Streaming-Media-Player/677842593?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=101015394&adid=22222222227255989920&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=c&wl3=302002573605&wl4=aud-430887228898:pla-539283231293&wl5=9003887&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=157246008&wl11=online&wl12=677842593&veh=sem&gclid=CjwKCAjw-YT1BRAFEiwAd2WRtuHwD8c67y0SkBaKQJo4bohiVUS91XPi6tCeq02rWNApwnii89O5VBoCLosQAvD_BwE

 

It's on Amazon prime for $53.99 as well with free prime shipping.

Edited by cayars
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