danb35
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- Aug 16, 2011
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Strange--I had a plasma TV for many years and never heard any fans.fans of a plasma TV
Strange--I had a plasma TV for many years and never heard any fans.fans of a plasma TV
Well it depends on your age and your hearing capabilities.Strange--I had a plasma TV for many years and never heard any fans.
Most none Plamsa-TVs today don't have fans. The Plasma TV i mentioned is only an example for comparrison to express how quiet my PC is.Also depends on whether the TV actually has fans--mine didn't.
Way off topic. Where are your speakers?Everything is of course a system design decision, but having a dedicated PC with an mouse/keyboard interface in a living room is not a good solution in my opinion. My Apple TV is managed by my phone or a very efficient remote. I also subscribe to the Scandinavian design school and having a actively cooled PC in the living room is completely out of the question. I also would get rid of bulky amplifiers, blue ray players and other head units like it. The TV is a design element in a room that need to be understated when not used. A fireplace, table or sitting group should be the main design elements.
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But to me, it is architecturally wrong. The purpose of a general NAS is to serve files and that's it. Not to transcode them.
I tested NVidia's Gamestream with moonlight on a raspberry pi 3. As a gamer i can say, it worked, but was awful and had to much lag for Ego-Shooters. And in the other room where the Gaming PC was running, everything was displayed on the computer monitor with direct access to the machine. If you don't want have other family members to interfere while your are playing via Gamestream in the living room, such solutions are not an option.As for playing games: I found that the SteamLink works great for 1080p content. Some TVs have that available onbox for 4K HDR; NVidia Shield can do 4k HDR, and I can see a way to build a 4K HDR steam streamer with that Pi competitor.
That's a very old fashioned opinion of how a dedicated PC can be controlled. I control my HTPC with a app on my phone or with my universal remote control from Logitech (also used for the TV and mediabox). No mouse no keyboard. The HTPC blends in with all my other media hardware. And yes the HTPC gets the content from my NAS (mostly FLAC audio files).Everything is of course a system design decision, but having a dedicated PC with an mouse/keyboard interface in
I don't consider browsing the Internet as a typically HTPC function. But sure, if you want to do that you can. I have a wireless keyboard (with mousepad) as well but it comes rarely out of its drawer.Internet
In principle I am with you on that account. But I can imagine that people are in need for a function that is best executed on a server that is already on 24/7. If you have the need for transcoding for what ever reason, old fashioned or not, then why not? It's all about needs and wants. Personally I have gone the ESXi way and use a VM with suitable software to transcode etc. While my way is not the only way it serves my needs. And let's be honest about one thing: A NAS appliance these days is not so much purely a NAS anymore. Especially in the home environment. And the same goes for FreeNAS. Just look around on the forum how much there is to do about plugins, docker, VM's etc. That speaks for itself.I'm a firm believer in letting a NAS be a NAS.
A few htpc on every few hours would still likely consume more. I mean if you go with a NAS with transcoding ability they are very energy efficient. If you take advantage of pre-transcoding (optimizing) then you could grab a raspberry pi 4 and use a nice external storage solution or a dedicated NAS to feed it. The pi would use less power than pretty much any other option.One benefit of a HTPC is that it only uses power when you need to use it. It can be off at other times. A server powerful enough to handle multiple high-quality transcodes of 4K content requires a lot of power, even at idle. I prefer optimizing my storage for storage purposes, that includes trying to lower its power budget as much as possible (power in my neck of the woods exceeds $0.25/kWh).
The last time I looked into this (transcoding high quality 4K content) even the most powerful Intel CPUs would have difficulty dealing with more than 2 high-quality streams at once. That may have changed since.
Have you actually measured the power of the Ryzen board? The ExtremeTech article for the 12-core 3900 this summer clocked the power needs between 240W at peak load and 70W at idle. Never mind the hard drives and so on.
As a point of comparison, my 8-disk array pulls about 90W most of the time. The hard drive array - pulls about 40W (about 5W at idle each) and the rest is server, SLOG, and L2ARC. Short of actually spinning the disks down (which FreeNAS allegedly is not a fan of), I doubt I can do much better unless I switch motherboards.
Over at Plex, here are some transcoding guidelines:
The Ryzen 9 3900x you seem to mention being available for $499 clocks in with a passmark at 31,905, which Plex argues is good for maybe 1-2 high quality 4K transcoding streams. With these Plex guidelines, I don't see how you can have 15 simultaneous users unless they're all consuming 1080P or lower-res content. Or am I missing something?
- 4K HDR(50Mbps, 10-bit HEVC) file: 17000 PassMarkscore (being transcoded to10Mbps 1080p)
- 4K SDR(40Mbps, 8-bit HEVC) file: 12000 PassMarkscore (being transcoded to10Mbps 1080p)
- 1080p(10Mbps, H.264) file: 2000 PassMarkscore
- 720p(4Mbps, H.264) file: 1500 PassMarkscore
Don't get me wrong, the Ryzen series is simply amazing re: price vs. performance. But I don't see the transcoding server vs. storage server + HTPC discussion as being entirely settled. Much of it seems to depend on end-use and preferences.