Plex server

[jpecora93]

I just got my Pine64 up and running with Plex and it will actually trans code a video from 1080P to 720P without a problem. I think the reasons the Pine is much faster is 1.) The GB Ethernet is a huge step up. 2.) The 64bit processor and 2GB of memory. I know that the 2GB of memory is not used that much by Plex but the ability for the overhead processes to stay in memory helps a ton. The biggest factor in the performance boost I am seeing is the Proc and the network connection.

Thanks
tkaiser  for the instructions. It worked perfectly.

Glad to help. And yes, you're right, Pine64 transcodes but since I tried it with my 'usual' test video first (jellyfish-100-mbps-hd-hevc.mkv which plays flawlessly in mpv with full video HW acceleration locally) and Plex complained about Pine64 being too slow I made a wrong assumption. Using the 50mbps variant of the same H.265 video surprisingly worked and I remembered what RPi-Monitor was made for (monitoring made easy) to verify all CPU cores are busy

And now we just have to wait maybe 8-12 weeks until the instructions above are added to a FAQ or a pinned post so that many other threads asking for Plex might appear in the forums. And then in 8-12 weeks a few more OS images were thrown in the wild and then new threads can be started why 'apt-get' only throws error messages when executed in OpenSuse, Fedora, CentOS or whatever OS image has been hacked together until then. It's all too funny.

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I think the reasons the Pine is much faster is 1.) The GB Ethernet is a huge step up. 2.) The 64bit processor and 2GB of memory

The 64 bit are not involved in any way but Pine64 is faster than RPi 2 even when running ARMv7 code (the installation method downloads a Plex server package provided by Synology that is able to run on really aging ARM SoCs):

Code:

tk@pain64:~$ file /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Server
/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.3, for GNU/Linux 2.6.16, stripped

DRAM isn't an issue either (with a headless OS image even the 512MB Pine64 will do fine)

But what might make a huge difference is that every Raspberry Pi out there only has one single USB2.0 connection to the outside (using an internal USB hub with implanted Fast Ethernet chip). So when dealing with media on an external disk every single bit passes the USB twice (disk --> SoC --> network) and this becomes really fast a bottleneck. And while Pine64 is also rather limited in this regard compared to other SBC the Ethernet NIC uses an own bus and USB also.

When/if networking challenges with the little Pine64 are resolved it should be able to run Plex with streaming rates of up to 90Mbits/sec also there.

So do you think the Plex Gods will come up with a 64bit version so it can fully utilize the Proc? I noticed a big uptic in speed on my lan at home and even outside the home. It plays much smoother. Are you running headless?  I have the ubuntu image you recommended but it loads a desktop. I would prefer to run headless.

Thanks and hopefully people realize how great the hardware is compared to RPI3 and start developing more and more for Pine64.