RockPro64 powerful enough as a Plex Media Server?

[TOMillr]

Has anyone done some testing regarding how well a RockPro64 works as a Plex Media Server?

Direct Streaming media shouldn't be a problem of course. But how about those instance when the server would have to transcode a video or audio stream?

In my setup most of my streaming would be done locally over the network to clients without the need of any transcoding. I'd only need power to transcode one video/audio stream at a time, for the few occasions when I'm not at home.

[Luke]

I have mine running Plex (and many other services, including rdp desktop which uses quite a few resources) and I must say that it performs really well for the most part. 95% of the time I have no issues with it, in the remaining 5% of the time movies sometimes halt to 'buffer'. This is obviously related to the type of file. For reference, this is on kernel 4.4 - performance may be better in this respect on 4.18, but someone else would have to comment on that.

[CrimsonKnight13]

Plex works great for me as well, especially with x265 8-bit & 10-bit videos. I am running it on 4.18 with no issues through 5GHz WiFi to my Samsung Smart TV.

[Luke]

Plex works great for me as well, especially with x265 8-bit & 10-bit videos. I am running it on 4.18 with no issues through 5GHz WiFi to my Samsung Smart TV.

I get a distinct impression that 4.18 performs better overall than the stock 4.4 in headless tasks.

[CrimsonKnight13]

I had issues with 4.18 with nfs freezing/dropping so I'm testing 4.4 out before I see which one is my main driver.

[gabrielsr]

I am currently running Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, nextCloud in docker containers configured by Ansible scripts using this project here:

https://github.com/dibrz/ARMBand

[TOMillr]

Any recommendations for choosing between the 2GB or 4GB version? Does is make any practical differences in every day use when you want to setup a RockPro64 as a Plex Media Server and NAS?

[gabrielsr]

Any recommendations for choosing between the 2GB or 4GB version? Does is make any practical differences in every day use when you want to setup a RockPro64 as a Plex Media Server and NAS?

I would recommend the 4GB version if you're willing to run companion services along with Plex, like sonarr, radarr, couchpotato, rutorrent, kodi, etc. That is my user case.

[Takenover83]

Anyone have a short guide for getting 4.18 going? Just trying to get every bit of performance I can get to keep buffering to a minimum. Thanks.

[dukla2000]

Starting from an Ayufan 0.7.9 image of your choice, preferably bionic minimal aarch64!
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-image-4.18.0-rc8-1060-ayufan-g45828c4db727
Thereafter you can edit /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf to specify a default, toggle between 4.4 and 4.18, etc