poop
the 2.5" size of disks are now mostly direct USB controller disks rather than sata adapters internally.
3.5" disks are still SATA as far as i’ve seen but the actual sku’s of the disks are often the lower grades. like you will get a disk that looks like another good disk but with only 64mb of dram instead of 256 on the one you would buy as a bare internal drive for example so they can end up a bit slower. and warranties are usually void.
Used to be my main source of disks, but these days there are better ways and it is easier to know exactly what you are getting.
Are you transcoding?
4mbit per client for 1080 is generally a workable minimum for the average casual watcher if you have H265 compatible clients (and a decent encoder, like a modern intel CPU for example), 6 - 8mbit per client if its H264 only.
Remember that the bitrate to quality curve for live transcoding isn’t as good as a slow, non-real-time encode done the brute force way on a CPU. so if you have a few videos that look great at 4mbit, dont assume your own transcodes will look quite that nice, you’re using a GPU to get it done as quickly as possible, with acceptable quality, not as slowly and carefully as possible for the best compression.
You’re confusing a container format (MKV) with a video codec (AV1)
MKV is just a container like a folder or zip file that contains the video stream (or streams, technically you can have multiple) which could be in H264, H265, AV1 etc etc, along with audio streams, subtitles and many other files that go along, like custom Fonts, Posters, etc etc.
As for the codec itself, AV1 done properly is a very good codec but to be visually lossless it isn’t significantly better than a good H265 encode without doing painfully slow CPU encodes, rather than fast efficient GPU encodes. people that are compressing their entire libraries to AV1 are sacrificing a small amount of quality, and some people are more sensitive to its flaws than others. in my case I try to avoid re-encoding in general. AV1 is also less supported on TVs and Media players, so you run into issues with some devices not playing them at all, or having to use CPU decoding.
So I still have my media in mostly untouched original formats, some of my old movie archives and things that aren’t critical like daily shows are H265 encoded for a bit of space saving without risking compatibility issues. Most of my important media and movies are not re-encoded at all, if I rip a bluray I store the video stream that was on the disk untouched.
N5095 ? lots of reports of that one not supporting everything it should based on other Jasper Lake chips, CPU getting hit for Decode when it shouldn’t for example. Also HDR to SDR cant be accelerated with VPP on that one as far as I know so the CPU gets smashed. I think you can do it with OpenCL though.
Was it an n100? They have a severely limited power budget of 6w compared to the n95 at 25w or so.
I’m running jellyfin ontop of ubuntu desktop while also playing retro games. That all sits in a proxmox vm with other services running alongside it. It’s perfectly snappy.
One of my miniPCs is just a little N95 and it can easily transcode 4K HDR to 1080p (HDR or tonemapped SDR) to a couple of clients, and with excellent image quality. You could build a nice little server with a modern i3 and 16gigs of ram and it would smash through 4 or 5 high bitrate 4K HDR transcodes just fine.
Is that one transcoding client local to you? or are you trying to stream over the web? if it’s local, put some of the budget to a new player for that screen perhaps?
I’ve had good luck with WD Blue NVME (SN550)
I’ve put several of those into machines at work and have had years without an issue. I’m also running a WD Blue SN550 1TB in my server as one of the caches, 25000 hours power on time, >100TB written, temperatures way higher than they should be and still over 93% health remaining according to smart.
I played Crysis on a Vuzix VR920 in around 2008, that was my first VR other than a virtual boy.
Dual 640x480, frame interleaved 3d at 30hz per eye! if you drop a single frame the eyes got out of sync and switched! I think I had dual 9600GTs at the time and it struggled. I think it also struggled on the dual 9800GTX+ I had after that.
head tracking was purely gyro/accelerometer based and worked very poorly.
That is awesome.
I played descent 1 and 2 for hours on end back in the day, never got to play 3 as I didn’t have a 3d card yet and they dropped the software renderer option.
Yip, I have a Linux VM running on one of my boxes in the garage that is plugged into a video matrix so I can bring it up on any screen in the house, I use the pi to connect Keyboard/Mouse/controllers etc to that when I’m using it.
I use Ubooquity and Komga, both mainly for the OPDS service which I access on various devices.
Ubooquity is good for basic book and file serving, but does support graphics. Komga is very much graphic focussed and is very good at it.
I replaced 4x Pi4 4gb with a single N95 mini PC with 16gb ram and wont look back.
Only PI left in my home is just running a 24/7 USBIP bridge.
the only reason to use a pi is if you need GPIO pins for custom devices.
In most cases yes, but hdd space is cheap enough that lossless compression is just the best option. Can always use them as originals to spin off mp3s or other compressed files when needed.
300cds would only be around 120 gigs flac compressed
Um. You got a picture of that plugged into the tv?
I’ve never seen that on the LGs I’ve seen, and I’m an AV technician.
There was a panasonic (I think it was them) that had a Displayport connection, but that didn’t last.
I suspect HDMI threatened to cut their licence if they kept putting DP on the TVs.
There are a few models available with 1920x1080 displays, but they are mostly still 4:3 screens and VGA inputs.
I have IPMI and web interfaces for most gear, I just don’t want to have to carry a laptop in every-time I need to tinker.
I also have a bunch of AV switchgear and it would be handy to adapt a multiviewer to one of the VGA ports for monitoring that side of things too.
the Arr apps will automate downloads but you can go into their ui’s manually for overriding things when needed (like replacing a bad copy of a TV show for example), jellyseer/overseer handles requesting and adding new shows/movies to be monitored from a simple webapp that you would host on the server and give them a shortcut to on their devices homepage.
I’d go with a 12th gen or newer intel cpu, something small and entry level is more than enough like a 12100 or 12400, we just want the igpu to handle the occasional transcode, 16gb of ram, a cache SSD or two in a mirror, and a decent stack of HDDs of your choice, the OS can be anything you want but I suggest going with something NAS focused like unraid, openmediavault or truenas (jellyfin is not officially supported on truenas but it does work). if it’s a new build from scratch for long term archival of high quality media i’d start with at least 6 HDDs, with one for parity, if you can budget for 20tb drives for example that gives you a spacious 100tb of useable space with the ability for any one disk to fail without any data loss. you can then build that into a normal ATX PC case.
You can use windows or any flavour of linux but you will be doing more work to make them work properly, where the above solutions are more plug and play.
I would make sure their hardware is capable of playing as many file formats and codecs directly as possible though, when you get into hosting 4K media, particularly for full fat UHD Bluray rips, you will find apps built into TVs or lower end streaming boxes just cant do it and the server has to chug through transcoding on the fly, the igpu can do it just fine, but you should try to avoid it for maximum performance and image quality, so perhaps budget for an nvidia shield or something.
I use Plexamp for that, Jellyfin does it too. You can assign libraries per user quite easily.
So for 3 users you might have 4 libraries, one per user then a shared library they all have access to.