Interested in how your live tv does

Sad thing is we don't currently have live TV. Haven't had cable or dish in years. Just doing this in preparation for hurricane season if Internet goes out for days again. I've also been trying out that Podcast BETA feature and it's been pretty nice.

What are you all using for Plex server gear?

I have plex as two servers, one on my qnap and the other is an intel nuc in my theatre room serving from my qnap storage

Skull Canyon running ESXi with a Server 2016 VM

As a plex server ?? Wow that’s dedicated hypervising there

Yup. I tried the NAS approach and it couldn't handle the transcoding

Admittedly my skull canyon is a digital pinball machine

That’s y I have nuc the qnap isn’t as good I find

Was going to do my synology slim instead of the nuc so it was all in one but again transcoding was slow

And that’s with ssd

So skill canyon with thunderbolt storage should work.

Skull Canyon should be fine. 4K transcodes won't work well with it though if you're into that.

For 4K what would you do?

I don’t have a 4K tv yet but...

Like any 4k stuff off a newer phone, GoPro, etc. has trouble. Skull Canyon is not future proof for that.

It can stream over the network (SMB share to whatever media player) usually. I have a friend though who has actual GPUs in a tower server and is able to get 4K streams working fine. I have not played with hardware acceleration yet: https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

Oh, well I guess I'll never be able to try it anyhow. I like the flexibility of VMs. Maybe if you didn't do ESXi with the Skull you can try that Intel Iris Pro/Radeon RX Vega M out: "Can I use Hardware-Accelerated Streaming inside of a virtual machine? Hardware-Acceleration Streaming is not currently possible inside of virtual machines, as virtual machine hosts do not expose low-level video hardware to the guest operating system. While some virtual machines expose generic 3D acceleration to the guest OS as a virtual driver, this does not include support for accelerated video decoding or encoding."

@Jason Samuel put xenserver instead and do gpu passthru

its works for hdx3d demos

might work for plex

Thanks, something to try out

Wouldn’t any hypervisor gpu pass through work?

it should ... theoretically... i know i have done it with XS

ESXi 6.5 is actually seeing that Iris Pro in the Skull. I never bothered to check. It's in the default Shared mode. I wonder if it will let me flip it to Shared Direct and this will actually work?

@User has joined the channel

Awesome chat folks, doing Plex on Synology which is more or less okay, normally 720/1020p. In the Car I have WD Passport Wireless Pro, but kids movies are optimized prior

Which synology ?? My slim couldn’t really handle the transcoding needed

My QNAP TS-659Pro+ with Intel Atom is also handling the transcoding from 720/1080p nicely

@User you blogged about your car setup somewhere?