4 ms·
The title is quite timely for me (though I acknowledge that the message of the article doesn't quite match it). I have spent hundreds of hours, over the course
by scubbo 6y ago
The title is quite timely for me (though I acknowledge that the message of the article doesn't quite match it). I have spent hundreds of hours, over the course of ~3 years, tweaking and tuning an NFS server on a RPi4 (1Gb RAM, 4x1.5GHz processor) to stream my media to various devices on Kodi on home network - with passable-at-best performance, but usually lots of pixellation, lag, buffering, audio mismatch, etc.
Last night I finally gave up on trying to do it the FOSS way, set up a Samba share on a 6-year-old mid-range PC (8Gb RAM, 3.5GHz processor), and got flawless playback on each of my troublesome media entities with less than ten minutes of effort. On a whim, I also tried setting up Plex (a semi-paid service), and got similarly smooth and flawless service. My idealistic 13-year-old self would be horrified to hear me say "I regret all that time I spent messing around with Linux, when I could have just used a Microsoft product, or a different paid product, that Just Work".
(And yes, I'm kind-of intentionally invoking Cunningham's Law, here, in the hopes that someone can suggest a way of tweaking a RPi4 to be an effective media server - I'd much rather use that than have my PC always-on, but if that's what it takes to get decent playback, I will)
- billyjobob 6y agoIs Samba not FOSS? Also the PC can probably run entirely free software while the Pi will require non-free binary blobs due to its proprietary Broadcom hardware design, so I would say the PC is preferable from a freedom perspective.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoIndeed it is https://www.samba.org/ https://www.samba.org/ Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good performance on a full-fledged PC.
- scubbo 6y ago> Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good performance on a full-fledged PC Is 1Gb RAM and 4x1.5GHz not considered sufficient specs to stream video? That is a genuine question, I'm not up-to-date on hardware specs nowadays - but it _seems_ like it should be sufficient to me. Obviously "more is better", but I'm surprised to hear that this is considered insufficient.
- SpliffnCola 6y agoIt's transcoding that is troublesome on the RPi and can be worsened as the resolution/image quality increases; Direct Play(stream) via Plex may alleviate that pain point, but your stream-playing device needs to be able to decode it directly. My Xbox One S for example can decode most streams with Direct Play using the Plex app (or all using VLC). Here[0] is a recent update from a Plex Team member about their knowledge of and intention to fix these issues, no timeline though. [0] https://forums.plex.tv/t/hardware-transcoding-for-raspberry-pi-4-plex-media-server/538779/85 https://forums.plex.tv/t/hardware-transcoding-for-raspberry-...
- scubbo 6y agoThanks!
- scubbo 6y ago> the PC is preferable from a freedom perspective Again - my 13-year-old self would have be stunned to hear that anything-other-than-Linux was preferable from a freedom perspective, and that "the standard Windows interoperability suite" is FOSS.
- crazypython 6y ago> My idealistic 13-year-old self would be horrified to hear me say "I regret all that time I spent messing around with Linux, when I could have just used a Microsoft product, or a different paid product, that Just Work". Plex is GNU General Public License version 3 free software. Lots of free software are and should be paid products.
- scubbo 6y agoRight, hence why I said "or a different paid product" to cover Plex.