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Help me understand my bottleneck (self.raspberrypi)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by madcaesar to c/[email protected]

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I'm running a raspberry pi 8GB version, as my plex entertainment center. I also ruin a pihole. The pie has an Ethernet connection.

I have two TV'S, a 2017 Samsung and a 2021 Hisense. Both with Ethernet connections.

My Samsung tv can't stream certain shows at all, they stutter like crazy I'm guessing it has something to do with the encoders? Yesterday I got a message color range not supported whatever the hell that is.

The Hisense TV does better on some shows, but still 4k content is unwatchable, it's constantly buffering.

So, is the problem with the pi? Is it not powerful enough for 4k shows, or some encoding problem or something?

Or is it the TVS, should I buy a Roku box instead, would that solve the streaming problems?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your options are something with more HP on the server side, or something that can direct play at the TV side. I've discovered a Ryzen 3300X is just not quite powerful enough to transcode 4k content, so I'm in the process of migrating media off my NAS and onto a dedicated server with an Intel 8700. The easiest path on the server side is to get an older Dell/HP/whatever desktop with as new of an Intel CPU as you can find - newer iGPUs support more codecs, but the 8th generation (like my 8700) seems to be a decent sweetspot. The Intel A380 also supports everything under the sun and is pretty cheap. Keep in mind you'll need PlexPass or switch to Jellyfin if you want GPU transcoding.

On the playback side, I think Nvidia Shield is your best bet. I've found my Roku stick works well with most video content, but generally needs transcoding if I turn on subtitles :/ I used an M1 Mac Mini as an HTPC, which handled everything extremely well but it's not as TV friendly nor as cheap - if it supported HDMI 2.1 and 4k120hz output I'd probably still be using it as an HTPC.

[–] madcaesar 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So more a full pc server instead of a nice compact pi... Yea maybe I'll have to go that route. I'll try a android tv box first.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yep unfortunately. I would start with an Nvidia Shield or similar on the Samsung if that's definitely where you want the 4k content. That's more or less what I did, though I've evolved to where I want streaming to work perfect out of the box on whatever screen I feel like using.

The good news is you don't need a lot of server (that's good)

But you want very specific functionality (that's bad)

Optimal hardware is not expensive, a reasonably modern Dell/HP/whatever desktop is probably fine (that's good)

But it's more complicated than "find something with H264/H265 support" because there's like eighty flavors of everything and you might want things like AV1 so you don't have to swap hardware in the future and you can run into problems where driver or library issues just randomly breaks certain codec combinations and there's no Just Buy This answer. (...)

.... that's bad. (can I go now)