PMS Question

[klepp0906 7]

I have a 45/6 web connection.  Wifi is set to n with channel manually set to 1 which no one in my area is using.  I've ran ookla speed test to be sure it's not a config isssue and am getting ~15mbps down via wifi.  My tv is sonys Bravia flagship running opera xbr65x950b.

when using the cd plex server i can "almost" run 3mb but it buffers every 30s or so.   To stream without buffering I'm limited to the lowest quality 720p (2mb) on my 4K FALD that hurts my soul

Now I'm no networking pro but I'm going to assume that the server is based over seas as per the "Dansk" language setting?  Is the speed problems I'm experiencing a result of not only how far away the media is being served but the speed of "his" connection and server?  Is this why no matter what I change I cannot surpass 2mb buffer free?

Just trying to determine what my options are if any to increase the quality.

That all said - amazing amazing server.  I'm thoroughly jealous!  I have two more curiosity based questions if the owner/admin of the server is around.

1) how much space does your media currently use?  Trying to get an idea for my own personal server in the future.

2)  does a means exist to automatically download the media you have or do you spend an ungodly amount of time keeping things like current shows updated/updating.  Ie: how/where do you get your media?

i began doing the torrent thing but almost everything required converting and the scope and scale to add any meaningful amount of media without some kind of automation is doable but staggering.  Just looking for insight from people with more experience using a HTPC etc.

To be clear - thread priority is definitely the stream speed though!

thanks guys!

 

 

 

[Suspense 2974]

Hi, 

I notice you are not VIP so i am curious how you have access :).

 

In any event, most of the plex servers are placed in germany or france, there are storage servers and then processing servers. The servers you actually access and stream media from dont actually contain any media at all, these processing servers grabs the media from remote storage servers and then feeds it to you. 

 

Depending on where you are, you will suffer reduced quality depending on the distance between you and the plex servers(not the storage server). We have no CDNs and getting something like that would just be much too expensive to operate. You could also be suffering from buffering due to transcoding, if you are on doing really busy hours and you happen to be transcoding, you might be experiencing throttling due to insufficient server resources, this is why we recommend everyone to direct play where possible, this means no subtitles enabled, quality on the highest possible or "original", so all the user and the server needs to deal with is sending data.

 

1) Currently we use about 15tb of storage, all content on CDs plex servers are re-encoded by us to allow for mostly clean media, aswell as compatibility and good size. Must new content now contains 2 audio tracks (AAC and AC3) and all metadata scrapped, this allows mostly any device to direct play the content, apple TV for example cannot play AAC 5.1 directly, but it can if its AC3, which is one of the reasons we roll with 2 audio tracks.

 

2) Media used to be handled manually, so back in the day we would grab shows each morning, then encode them, then apply to processing servers etc, took an aweful lot of time. At this point in time it is all automated, we use jdownloader/utorrent along with Sonarr to handle TV shows, it keeps track of air dates and grabs torrents based on specific criteria set by us. Once a torrent completes, our automatic encode process kicks in, it re-encodes the file and makes sure its renamed to something proper, and then moved to the tv show folder.  Plex then scans the libraries, and content is then pushed to the user.

[klepp0906 7]

I am VIP but i turned off automatic renewal, unless it just ran out by coincidence.. so you removed me.. just wasted 10m trying to find out what happened.  care to look at my payment history and either let me know if it ran out, or let me know if you cancelling it via paypal even though i already paid caused you to wrongly remove me.

 

so someone posts about it and you literally check to see if theyre legit right away?  that must be a lot of work.

[Suspense 2974]

Just now, klepp0906 said:

I am VIP but i turned off automatic renewal, unless it just ran out by coincidence.. so you removed me.. just wasted 10m trying to find out what happened.  care to look at my payment history and either let me know if it ran out, or let me know if you cancelling it via paypal even though i already paid caused you to wrongly remove me.

 

so someone posts about it and you literally check to see if theyre legit right away?  that must be a lot of work.

Hi, 

We dont check anything manually, there are an automated task running on the backend that checks invites users against CD Vips several times a day, if you were demoted, it was because of this task. 

 

According to the donation statistics, your last donation was set to expire on the 24th of December, it is a little odd that your plex access wasnt removed until now. Theres no automatic payments for CD vip, so unless you go donate manually, it will run out. 

[klepp0906 7]

well.. either way I just renewed my VIP recently because I used the HB for wow and plex was just a bonus.

I jsut lost my wow accounts in last weeks bannings so I intended to keep using CD for the plex server alone.  I cancellled all recurring payments in my paypal because most of them were wow related and I knew when this ran out I could just repay 10 bucks and be good again.  Not sure which one was you guys as I also donate at nulled and they have similar names as the recipient/i was unable to discern which was who or maybe theyre both owned by the same person.  No idea.  Either way they were all cancelled.

That being said, I know for a fact it hasnt been 90 days so are you telling me you have no history of my last payment?  that seems hard to believe and really shoddy/not a good idea.

If one exists, please let me know the date of my last donation.  I think your system either sees me as not a VIP because I cancelled the charging in paypal, or by some supreme coincidence my memory is bad and it has been 3 months + i decided to inquire about the speeds + i posted in the chat box and got removed from the server all at the same time.

Either way i appreciate your prior answer - havent had a chance to go through it yet as im trying to get myself reconnected to the PMS first.  I know your trying to help so please check when my last donation was so we can check this off the list or I can make another donation.

[klepp0906 7]

as i wait for your reply - I gleaned some very useful information from your post so far!

I wasnt using "original" as I assumed that would use even more bandwidth/cause worse buffering.  Normally I do use original for everything except for remote/outside of my home off of wifi for data reasons.  Also I have direct play enabled but I didnt know subtitles effected transcoding etc.  That could have a large deal to do with my problem then.   I'll disable subtitles and go from there.  (ive become partial to subtitles, used to hate them but with a baby around its either miss dialogue or wake the baby without them lol)

[Suspense 2974]

Just now, klepp0906 said:

well.. either way I just renewed my VIP recently because I used the HB for wow and plex was just a bonus.

I jsut lost my wow accounts in last weeks bannings so I intended to keep using CD for the plex server alone.  I cancellled all recurring payments in my paypal because most of them were wow related and I knew when this ran out I could just repay 10 bucks and be good again.  Not sure which one was you guys as I also donate at nulled and they have similar names as the recipient/i was unable to discern which was who or maybe theyre both owned by the same person.  No idea.  Either way they were all cancelled.

That being said, I know for a fact it hasnt been 90 days so are you telling me you have no history of my last payment?  that seems hard to believe and really shoddy/not a good idea.

If one exists, please let me know the date of my last donation.  I think your system either sees me as not a VIP because I cancelled the charging in paypal, or by some supreme coincidence my memory is bad and it has been 3 months + i decided to inquire about the speeds + i posted in the chat box and got removed from the server all at the same time.

Either way i appreciate your prior answer - havent had a chance to go through it yet as im trying to get myself reconnected to the PMS first.  I know your trying to help so please check when my last donation was so we can check this off the list or I can make another donation.

Like i already said, theres no such thing as a recurring payment on CD, you pay once and then you must manually pay again, you cannot set up a subscription on CD for VIP, so you cannot have "removed" us from your paypal.

 

I already told you that your last donation was set to expire on the 24th of December, if you substract 90 days from this date, you have your donation date that we have on record. This would be, the 25th of september.

[Suspense 2974]

Just now, klepp0906 said:

as i wait for your reply - I gleaned some very useful information from your post so far!

I wasnt using "original" as I assumed that would use even more bandwidth/cause worse buffering.  Normally I do use original for everything except for remote/outside of my home off of wifi for data reasons.  Also I have direct play enabled but I didnt know subtitles effected transcoding etc.  That could have a large deal to do with my problem then.   I'll disable subtitles and go from there.  (ive become partial to subtitles, used to hate them but with a baby around its either miss dialogue or wake the baby without them lol)

Subtitles on most apps will cause transcoding, with plex home theatre you can overlay them locally, this will not result in transcoding.

[klepp0906 7]

wow..  talk about nuts.  I just checked my paypal history and sure as shit, it ran out the 25th.   No idea why i still had it a few days later if it checks "multiple times a day" but I suppose I owe you an apology.  Incoming funds

[Suspense 2974]

Just now, klepp0906 said:

wow..  talk about nuts.  I just checked my paypal history and sure as shit, it ran out the 25th.   No idea why i still had it a few days later if it checks "multiple times a day" but I suppose I owe you an apology.  Incoming funds

No worries

[klepp0906 7]

naw, i made an ass of myself.  I am absolutely aware i have a bad memory but 3 months is a pretty healthy chunk of time.  Goes to show how time flies at our age i guess.  

Anyways, I was really adamant and had myself convinced considering the coincidental timing of the ban+the removal on paypal+the removal from the server.  I was so certain that was the case I began to get cynical.

Sincere apologies.   I know you work your ass off and you didnt deserve that.  I'm sorry, thank you for the thorough reply above which I'm certain is going to help my quality/speed issue and have a great rest of the holiday

[klepp0906 7]

aaaand after the slew of emails/plex pins/repayments/posts/paypal history checkings.. I noticed you DID even reply to me regarding the date of expiration in your prior post.

I was either so worked up I only read the first half of the post and missed the rest (as it doesnt say it was edited/added) or the post went up but I didnt see it as I didnt refresh the page or view it until after I had posted in reply to the former.

way to make me feel EVEN worse

 

that being said, im now thoroughly schooled on the functioning of your donation system so you wont have to worry about irrelevant inquiries coming from me again!

[klepp0906 7]

36 minutes ago, Suspense said:

Hi, 

I notice you are not VIP so i am curious how you have access :).

 

In any event, most of the plex servers are placed in germany or france, there are storage servers and then processing servers. The servers you actually access and stream media from dont actually contain any media at all, these processing servers grabs the media from remote storage servers and then feeds it to you. 

 

Depending on where you are, you will suffer reduced quality depending on the distance between you and the plex servers(not the storage server). We have no CDNs and getting something like that would just be much too expensive to operate. You could also be suffering from buffering due to transcoding, if you are on doing really busy hours and you happen to be transcoding, you might be experiencing throttling due to insufficient server resources, this is why we recommend everyone to direct play where possible, this means no subtitles enabled, quality on the highest possible or "original", so all the user and the server needs to deal with is sending data.

 

1) Currently we use about 15tb of storage, all content on CDs plex servers are re-encoded by us to allow for mostly clean media, aswell as compatibility and good size. Must new content now contains 2 audio tracks (AAC and AC3) and all metadata scrapped, this allows mostly any device to direct play the content, apple TV for example cannot play AAC 5.1 directly, but it can if its AC3, which is one of the reasons we roll with 2 audio tracks.

 

2) Media used to be handled manually, so back in the day we would grab shows each morning, then encode them, then apply to processing servers etc, took an aweful lot of time. At this point in time it is all automated, we use jdownloader/utorrent along with Sonarr to handle TV shows, it keeps track of air dates and grabs torrents based on specific criteria set by us. Once a torrent completes, our automatic encode process kicks in, it re-encodes the file and makes sure its renamed to something proper, and then moved to the tv show folder.  Plex then scans the libraries, and content is then pushed to the user.

AWESOME!!

(2) I figured something like this had to exist.  Now that I know it does - once I upgrade my storage I'm gonna get off and running!  (only have 4tb on my data drives at current, not to mention I reckon redundancy ala a raid 1 or 0+1 is probably a good idea)

I'm impressed, truly.  Automation of show acquisition is a dangerous thing lol, do you find yourself being attacked by DMC or your ISP for data overage? 

One more question - I imagine Jdownloader (i use qbittorrent but used to use utorrent) handles the automation of the download process, how do you handle the automation of the encoding?  That would be just as necessary/beneficial as encoding takes a tremendous amount of time as well as I know your aware.

 

Thats all, and thank you again!

[Suspense 2974]

59 minutes ago, klepp0906 said:

AWESOME!!

(2) I figured something like this had to exist.  Now that I know it does - once I upgrade my storage I'm gonna get off and running!  (only have 4tb on my data drives at current, not to mention I reckon redundancy ala a raid 1 or 0+1 is probably a good idea)

I'm impressed, truly.  Automation of show acquisition is a dangerous thing lol, do you find yourself being attacked by DMC or your ISP for data overage? 

One more question - I imagine Jdownloader (i use qbittorrent but used to use utorrent) handles the automation of the download process, how do you handle the automation of the encoding?  That would be just as necessary/beneficial as encoding takes a tremendous amount of time as well as I know your aware.

 

Thats all, and thank you again!

Utorrent launches our encode script once a file is done downloading, the encode script takes care of moving it to its tv show folder once its done, the tv show folder is defined by sonarr.

[junjlo 2]

mind sharing your encode script lol!

[junjlo 2]

also if you dont mind me asking what newgroup service do you use?