Limiting Playback Options - Transcoding

[HeWhoWas 0]

Hey Guys,

 

I'm looking for a solution for emby that would cut out on-demand transcoding altogether. My situation is as such:

 

• A remote server running the Sonarr/SabNzbd/CouchPotato/etc stack.
• Emby running on the remote server.
• As episodes are downloaded and sorted, emby picks them up and makes them available to play.
• Up to 10 family members can be playing back the streams at any given time.

The server is an i7 @ 3.6ghz, and can only encode one stream at a time, possibly two with a high load. So, a few questions:

 

• Does Emby support adaptive bitrate HLS? This would be awesome if so.
• Is there any way to transcode videos into a known working format, or formats, and just disable the on-demand encoding feature?

I work in DevOps and have come from a Development background, so I'm not opposed to getting my hands dirty and hacking some of this into place, I would just rather avoid re-inventing the wheel if possible. If there's no way to do what I'm asking, and someone is interested in the featureset, drop me a line.

 

Cheers guys!

 

Ben.

Edited October 29, 2015 by HeWhoWas

[Luke 42077]

yes, we do stream HLS, but really the most important thing to do is compare the formats of your videos to the formats that are supported by the devices you intend to play on.

[MSattler 390]

Hey Guys,

 

I'm looking for a solution for emby that would cut out on-demand transcoding altogether. My situation is as such:

 

• A remote server running the Sonarr/SabNzbd/CouchPotato/etc stack.
• Emby running on the remote server.
• As episodes are downloaded and sorted, emby picks them up and makes them available to play.
• Up to 10 family members can be playing back the streams at any given time.

The server is an i7 @ 3.6ghz, and can only encode one stream at a time, possibly two with a high load. So, a few questions:

 

• Does Emby support adaptive bitrate HLS? This would be awesome if so.
• Is there any way to transcode videos into a known working format, or formats, and just disable the on-demand encoding feature?

I work in DevOps and have come from a Development background, so I'm not opposed to getting my hands dirty and hacking some of this into place, I would just rather avoid re-inventing the wheel if possible. If there's no way to do what I'm asking, and someone is interested in the featureset, drop me a line.

 

Cheers guys!

 

Ben.

 

An i7 proc and you can only encode one stream?  Just because it uses 90-100% cpu doesn't mean you cannot have multiple streams transcoding at the same time.   The cpu message will be reduced so that two streams can transcode at the same time.  I have a i7-4770s and can have 4-5 streams transcoding at the same time without issue.

[HeWhoWas 0]

yes, we do stream HLS, but really the most important thing to do is compare the formats of your videos to the formats that are supported by the devices you intend to play on.

 

I've seen the HLS encoding happening, but from what I can tell the output is only a single bitrate stream. I would like to use adaptive bit-rate streaming a la Netflix/Youtube, that scales quality based on available bandwidth.

 

And ideally, I'd like to be able to just leave devices out. If there's no pre-transcoded stream, there's no playback, sorry.

 

 

An i7 proc and you can only encode one stream?  Just because it uses 90-100% cpu doesn't mean you cannot have multiple streams transcoding at the same time.   The cpu message will be reduced so that two streams can transcode at the same time.  I have a i7-4770s and can have 4-5 streams transcoding at the same time without issue.

 

I have other processes which need to be able to use the CPU. NZB repairs and archive extraction are probably the most CPU intensive.

Edited October 29, 2015 by HeWhoWas

[Luke 42077]

what you can do at the server level is disable transcoding access for specific users. in this case, it sounds like you'll want to do that for each user. then what will happen is the user will get a friendly error message if there is no way for them to play the content.

[HeWhoWas 0]

Thanks, I'll have a look into it

 

Just to confirm: Does Emby support adaptive bitrate HLS videos?

[Luke 42077]

server supports it, but i disabled it a while back because not all client video players implement it very well. by client video players i don't really mean our own but rather the ones we embed or rely on. It should probably be reevaluated as a lot has changed but for you it's not going to matter anyway. we only use HLS when transcoding anyway. the rest of the time it just direct streams the original file with byte range requests.

[HeWhoWas 0]

For what it's worth, I understand FlowPlayer has adaptive HLS support on a lot of platforms at the moment, as long as you don't mind flash fallback. The only consistent issues I've had with HLS playback on other platforms is Android, which appears to be a device/version specific issue.

Edited October 29, 2015 by HeWhoWas