So I have been playing with plex for a while on one of my older PCs but it could never really get off the ground for me because the PC was bulky and powering it 24/7 was just unwieldly. It had a fine cpu in it but nothing about it was low power and it would warm up a room after several hours. I wanted to go to a mini pc like config but at the time the only ones with ideal passmarks were expensive and base on intel core processors. Recently when researching NAS devices to investigate plex feasibility I came across the celeron j3455. Based on sky lake, a true quadcore that runs at a measly 10 watts but still manages to hit 2k passmark, one of the hallmarks of a cpu that can take on 1080p transcoding. It really was the cpu I had been waiting for, and it could be had in intel's newest line of NUCs for the dirt cheap price of $129! So I looked up some research to make sure it wasn't crippled by something and made the purchase. I paired it up with 4gb and while I was thinking I could probably get away with one of my older mechanical hard drives, last minute made me switch it up with a 250gb SSD I wasn't using.
So installation went without a hitch, the HD installation is one of the most painless I have experienced which is a big change from the MSI Cubi who'se wrapped sata cable required so much pressure on the header "lego" to snap in that I damaged it and now the HD doesnt show up if kinked at certain angles (m.2 available if the cable dies and can't be replaced thankfully) . Intel was actually smart enough to provide a one download package with all current software for this NUC version so getting up an running was painless.. although a little slow. The multi-core encode benchmarks may not lie and the newest acceleration methods means your online video streams will never lag, but when it comes to zippng through windows install, drivers, apps... it feels like a $129 computer... on an SSD.
I definitely notice this in plex. After initial setup and figuring out once again how to installed the absolute series scanner again I hooked up my anime fansub drives and poured it all in one go (btw all my video will be on these usb 3 drives. Did not intend to store much on the internal drive). My collection is about %90 auto-matched after which I had to spend a couple hours matching the rest. The scan itself didn't seem to take any longer then on my other computer, but things were a little different after things were loaded. I have 370 anime series, so the UI through the web browser really beats on that processor and you will definitely see it. Thankfully I have no plans to use it after initial setup as the plex server will be headless and adding stuff can be done externally.
So, now I can't vouche for long term stability yet, but it is now headless and has had little problem with streaming and transcoding what I need to my roku express (just happens to be what is in the bedroom). I can't seem to find the tick box any more that lets me see in the log files the transcode coefficent index (ie how much lower or faster then realtime it is able to work) and I don't see anything about it in searches so it seems to have gone the way of the dodo, however one of my series is a 10mbit 1080p and it had no buffer pauses in the 24 minute episode. I will definitely be giving it a work out this up coming week when all my content is online and organised.
Also a little about heat and noise, the NUC actually has a design flaw where the fan can only sense the temp from 2 motherboard sensor, one is on the voltage regulators and the other is on the far edge of the mobo ideal for case temps. So it is quite awful at actually being a cpu fan, luckly unless you are running prime95 it shouldn't overheat. I literally mean this, I think the only way to overwhelm the automatic fan is running prime95 in which case it can throttle the turbo way down. The fans automatic response is pretty much going to be fan off and fan %20. On the first day after many hours of installing and plex importing my library it was mearly warm to he touch and the barley audible fan was kicking out some warm air at the speed of a fart from a flea. You CAN set the fan speed to something static in the bios (wonderful visual bios system btw) as well as setting up color/brightness/response of the power and hard drive LED indicators. I am keeping the fan on auto because I want it off when the system is idle.
Also something thats nice, hopeful but not really accessible yet, since the beginning of the year plex has had quicksync acceleration in a beta build available to plex pass owners. Unfortunately work on it seems to be rather slow and it is still in beta, it seems to be getting most of its face time on NAS servers with intel CPUs. Thankfully I don't need it but it will be nice once it comes out as it yields significant performance increases on the j3455.
So far it covers everything I needed it to do. It gets all my content organised and streamable to any of the many streamers in my house (cable is cut, everything is done through the streamers) as well as the ability to stream it remotely to my phone. There isn't much chance that I will need more then one transcode in my house, obviously if you need more transcode streams you will need to jump to a bigger and more expensive cpu, but then there is no shortage of those. Oh and for the moment i am going to keep the Intel NUC on wifi, its 802.11ac 1x1 is getting a 433mbps link and since it will only be sending out streams of 2-10mbps I don't feel it will overwhelm my wifi in the least. I don't need another Ethernet cable snaking from my network cluster. -_-
If you want me to try anything with plex on it leave a note. Can't answer any questions about kodi though, I gave up trying to understand it so its not anywhere to be found here.
So installation went without a hitch, the HD installation is one of the most painless I have experienced which is a big change from the MSI Cubi who'se wrapped sata cable required so much pressure on the header "lego" to snap in that I damaged it and now the HD doesnt show up if kinked at certain angles (m.2 available if the cable dies and can't be replaced thankfully) . Intel was actually smart enough to provide a one download package with all current software for this NUC version so getting up an running was painless.. although a little slow. The multi-core encode benchmarks may not lie and the newest acceleration methods means your online video streams will never lag, but when it comes to zippng through windows install, drivers, apps... it feels like a $129 computer... on an SSD.
I definitely notice this in plex. After initial setup and figuring out once again how to installed the absolute series scanner again I hooked up my anime fansub drives and poured it all in one go (btw all my video will be on these usb 3 drives. Did not intend to store much on the internal drive). My collection is about %90 auto-matched after which I had to spend a couple hours matching the rest. The scan itself didn't seem to take any longer then on my other computer, but things were a little different after things were loaded. I have 370 anime series, so the UI through the web browser really beats on that processor and you will definitely see it. Thankfully I have no plans to use it after initial setup as the plex server will be headless and adding stuff can be done externally.
So, now I can't vouche for long term stability yet, but it is now headless and has had little problem with streaming and transcoding what I need to my roku express (just happens to be what is in the bedroom). I can't seem to find the tick box any more that lets me see in the log files the transcode coefficent index (ie how much lower or faster then realtime it is able to work) and I don't see anything about it in searches so it seems to have gone the way of the dodo, however one of my series is a 10mbit 1080p and it had no buffer pauses in the 24 minute episode. I will definitely be giving it a work out this up coming week when all my content is online and organised.
Also a little about heat and noise, the NUC actually has a design flaw where the fan can only sense the temp from 2 motherboard sensor, one is on the voltage regulators and the other is on the far edge of the mobo ideal for case temps. So it is quite awful at actually being a cpu fan, luckly unless you are running prime95 it shouldn't overheat. I literally mean this, I think the only way to overwhelm the automatic fan is running prime95 in which case it can throttle the turbo way down. The fans automatic response is pretty much going to be fan off and fan %20. On the first day after many hours of installing and plex importing my library it was mearly warm to he touch and the barley audible fan was kicking out some warm air at the speed of a fart from a flea. You CAN set the fan speed to something static in the bios (wonderful visual bios system btw) as well as setting up color/brightness/response of the power and hard drive LED indicators. I am keeping the fan on auto because I want it off when the system is idle.
Also something thats nice, hopeful but not really accessible yet, since the beginning of the year plex has had quicksync acceleration in a beta build available to plex pass owners. Unfortunately work on it seems to be rather slow and it is still in beta, it seems to be getting most of its face time on NAS servers with intel CPUs. Thankfully I don't need it but it will be nice once it comes out as it yields significant performance increases on the j3455.
So far it covers everything I needed it to do. It gets all my content organised and streamable to any of the many streamers in my house (cable is cut, everything is done through the streamers) as well as the ability to stream it remotely to my phone. There isn't much chance that I will need more then one transcode in my house, obviously if you need more transcode streams you will need to jump to a bigger and more expensive cpu, but then there is no shortage of those. Oh and for the moment i am going to keep the Intel NUC on wifi, its 802.11ac 1x1 is getting a 433mbps link and since it will only be sending out streams of 2-10mbps I don't feel it will overwhelm my wifi in the least. I don't need another Ethernet cable snaking from my network cluster. -_-
If you want me to try anything with plex on it leave a note. Can't answer any questions about kodi though, I gave up trying to understand it so its not anywhere to be found here.
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