I’m looking into redoing my media server and I would like recommendations for a front end. My hope is to find one where I can have a node at my parents and my girlfriend’s parents houses that have some but not all of the media. I want them to not have to care about the servers and just be able to pick something and if it is on the local server it will pick that one. If anyone has any recommendations I would love to hear them.
The networks will be connected by VPN tunnels and I have my methods of moving the media between the servers sorted out. I’m currently using plex but I dont like that I cant see whats on all available servers at once, not to mention FOSS would be ideal.
There are some cluster based experiments with Plex, but they’re mostly focused on distributing transcoding. There’s also a lot of projects around clustering locally with kubernetes/etc but I think that would be painful with your setup. Closest option I can think of is jellyswarrm with multiple discrete servers ‘swarmed’ together, this is also super beta and very new. You’d have to combine it with something to move files between the local servers, it’s going to be weird.
Why do you feel like you need more than one media server? A singular server can serve quite a lot of content for a good sized quantity of people.
Upload bandwidth is the mail reason for it being distributed. I can serve 1 but not both of the parents houses from my apartment. By moving some of the load to their house for the series they watch means I dont have to worry about them both watching a show and the bandwidth means neither of them can. Moving the files is managed. Basically a script using rsync.
I’ll take a look at jellyswarm thank you.
Are you trying to serve higher than 1080p? I have heard that 4k can be rough, but I avoid that personally because it also dramatically limits the amount of media I can store. Not sure of your actual bandwidth, but the raw bandwidth required on regular 1080p streams should be relatively light while utilizing modern codecs and you can also limit the per-stream bandwidth in your remote access settings.
I’m in the US, but I have pretty shit upstream bandwidth and I’ve served 7 people at once before. It pushed it a bit, but plex managed it. If you are doing 4k content though, yeah, that’s going to be rough with anything and I have no good advice.
Easiest: say “hey pick the movies you want and I’ll load those ones for you”. I’m sure you have movies that they are not ever interested in watching.
Most technical: I’m sure there’s some kind of “just in time” filesystem, or maybe some kind of tiering. I’m imagining a FS that stores just enough of the first few MB to cover streaming the rest from a peer. Tiering definitely exists, though, where you could offer all media, but some files might only be available over the WAN.
you could have one plex master server accessing multiple storage servers over SMB/NFS without much hassle, that allows combined libraries and more or less seamless access if the network and connection between servers is up to scratch as it would require reasonably high bandwidth, but multiple separate servers is a bit of a pain as you cant easily combine them and you would have to have split libraries AFAIK.
Unfortunately my goal with having it distributed is to lower bandwidth usage as have a low upload bandwidth.
That will unfortunately make any server-side improvements moot. You can scale up transcoding capabilities all you like, but the internet is made of Tubes.
Now if you could find some friends in telecom and have your server live at a peering point…
