Add Plex Hardware Transcoding to Any Synology using $120 ZimaBoard

all right how's it going you so today I'm excited because Zab board has sponsored this tutorial onto how to add hardware transcoding for Plex or like M or jelly fin to any sonology ass by just adding on one of their boxes so Zim board sponsored this tutorial thanks to them I actually came up with it and it's a video I've been wanting to make for a while and it ended up just working out quite well that they were offering to sponsor it but what zma board is is it's kind of like a Raspberry Pi just on steroids and for this video one critical thing that it has is it has a Intel CPU with Intel Quicks sync and that can solve a ton of people's problems because when the DS 923 generation came out sonology switched from Intel to AMD for their CPUs and in my experience the AMD CPUs are a good bit faster and more performant for pretty much all tasks except for one thing transcoding a video in something like Plex because AMD does not have a compa comptible GPU built into the CPU that can be used in Plex they do have one that is similar but Plex does not work with it at least as the time they're recording this video so this right here is that perfect add-on where you can just essentially run Plex on this device while using your Nas for storage and this can actually kill two birds with one stone not only are you just going to get better performance out of Hardware transcoding than software transcoding you're also going to be offloading all that processing to a separate device than your Nas and so if you've got a busy file server and you don't want the entire thing to grind to a halt because one person's transcoding a video and plx it's perfect you can offload all that functionality to this device and have Hardware transcoding built in they have three different models a 2 four and 8 gig model with a slightly different CPU in them but all three of those models have the same Intel Quicks sync GPU in them so for this they all should perform a essentially the same Plex does probably want more than 2 gigs of RAM so it may be worth it to upgrade to the 4 Gig model this is the 8 gig model but in reality you should very much be able to get almost the same if not identical performance out of the 2 gig version of this which is currently at the time recording about $120 us they also do seem to have a board coming out that is much cheaper that still does seem to have Intel Quicks sync on it so I'm very interested to see that when it does come out all right so this is not going to be much of an unboxing or anything we're just going to go ahead and start setting this thing on up and pulling it out all right so this right here is the zema board and it's actually got a couple of cool things on it it's got 2 gigb ethernet ports which is huge and so for this video we're only going to be using one of those but if you wanted to you could also set actually use the other one to be plugged directly into the back of this anology and build a direct Connection in between the two units so any kind of networking stuff this is doing and pulling from the sonology would not be affecting any of the other throughput on the sonology you could do that you could also set up with NFS really whatever you'd like to do but for this we just are going to be using the one because in general you can get away with pretty much anything with a 1 gbit connection with Plex I've never really seen a server that needs more than that and anything that would need more than that would absolutely nuke this machine and if you also don't have a Synology you could also just use the multiple SATA ports in the back to just atro and hard drives or even the PCI Express slot to do whatever you want to it's a pretty cool board it's really designed for tinkering like truly Raspberry Pi on steroids but all we're actually going to do is plug in one of these into my network and turn it on and that's pretty much going to be it and I'm going to go ahead and log into my computer all right so I've just powered it on and we're actually going to be configuring this all via SSH if you've never used SSH before on Mac OS and on Windows you can both open up Powershell for Windows terminal for Mac OS and just SSH on in and so for this we're actually just going to use the default username password to SSH on in which is enabled by default and it also has the host name called Casa OS which is what zma board runs so we're just going to SSH using SSH Kasa OS as the username at Casa os. looc as the IP address and the password is CA OS so username password host name by default are all Casa OS all lowercase the very first thing we want to go ahead and do is look at what the date is so my date is correct if not make sure yours is as well and we're actually just going to go ahead and follow a pretty basic guide on how to install Plex on Debian so what we're going to do is we're just going to follow this guide we are a Debian based distribution I will leave a link down description below for this and we are just going to Echo this right here by saying pseudo Echo and what this is going to do is this is just going to add the signature for the Plex Media Server into our distribution and now we are going to add in the key now it has been added on in there so we're going to do a pseudo app update to update our packages especially it's been a while so it is not a big deal and so now doing our pseudo apt update we're just going to do pseudo apt install Plex Media Server and let that go ahead and install now one other thing I did want to mention is this is actually a rule for Plex if you're using something like jelly fin or MB you don't have the same limitation but if you do want to use Plex Media Server and Hardware transcoding that is required for you to have a Plex pass all right so we have just installed Plex Media server on here so now we should be able to just go to Casa OS and the port and be able to get in there just to confirm that is working we're going to do a pseudo system control status Plex Media Server all right so now that we know that Plex Media Server is successfully running we can actually just log straight into it using our web browser we are just going to go to Casa .lo colon 324 that's the port SL web so CA os. local and then colon 32400 SL web and this is now Plex installed on our device so just sign in with your Plex account and we're just going to set this up as a Plex Media Server for now skip the media library because that is going to be in the next step and now we are Bare Bones signed in we can look at zma board demo and the first thing we want to go ahead and do is enable our actual Hardware transcoding when available so we're going to say yes use Hardware transcoding when available all right so now we have successfully installed plx on our zma board the next thing we want to go ahead and do is we want to go ahead and set up our sonology to actually be the media folder for the zma board and so I've got a DS 923 behind me and we're going to go ahead and set that up so I'm going to go ahead and log into my Nas and the first thing we want to go ahead and do is create a account just for this zema board for being able to actually just access this one media folder and we're just going to generate it a password so the first thing we're going to go ahead and do if you've not already created a shared folder where your media is go and create one of those and now we're also going to go in and and we are going to create a new user who only has access to that I'm going to call it flex zma and we're just going to generate a random password and copy that on in there it's really more like just a access token than a password because it's really just going to be used for this one connection we are only going to give them access to the media file and this is your option if you want to give it read right or readon I'm going to give it read right because that will allow Plex to actually delete media as required and will also allow us to offload some additional functionality you can also deny from some random stuff if you wanted to the important thing is we're going to be mounting over SMB which is going to give us a solid connection there all right so now we've created this Plex zma user now all we have to do is go ahead and mount this drive and we're going to set up to mount on boot so we're going to be mounting the SMB shared folder of media onto our actual zema board every time it boots up and then Plex on the Zab board is going to read that media and use that to actually be our media server so we're going to go back in and we are going to make sure that we've got a couple of things installed so we're going to do a pseudo app install cifs utilities it comes preloaded but just in case also add [Music] tools and you can safely say yes to everything all right so now we are going to be able to go ahead and mount this drive on boot so to do that we're going to be using the fs tab file and this is where we're going to be doing a bit of text editing the first thing we need to do is go into root and we're going to see that by default there is this MNT folder and so we're going to CD into that and we're going to create a new directory in there with a pseudo MK dear we're going to call it Plex Media and we're going to change the permission to this Plex Media directory to 777 which is normally something you do not want to do but in this case we want any other apps and packages we're installing on this zema board to be able to access our media so if you add apps to transcode stuff or anything like that you're going to be able to just have everything access the media on it very easily it is not sensitive stuff it is your media and so it is a safe thing to do in this case if you are more apt with Linux you can also go ahead and start adding groups and making sure that only specific package groups have access to the Plex Media directory but for novices getting started this is something that is safe to do because it only has access to the media on the sonology so we are going to do a pseudo CH mod plus 777 duplex media we are going to to go ahead and see that there is a folder here called Plex Media and nothing's in it right now all right so now we want this Plex Media folder right here to be populated with the one that is on our Nas and we're going to do that by editing the fstab bio with a pseudo Nano Etc fstab do not touch either one of these and we're going to add another comment here as a separate one down at the bottom so the way we're going to do this is we going to do back slashback slash the IP address or the host name of the nas so for me it's Nas one. loal If you have a static IP address on your local network for the nas you can put that here and then slash the folder name Media or whatever you've call it called it so this is what's on the Nas and now where do we want to put it well we want to put it at mntx media that folder we just created now we're going to say CFS for the file type and now some special permissions so normally you would not want to have the password directly in this file because it'd be plain text readable by anybody but once again this is for Basics where we're just getting started out and this user only has access to this media folder on the nasp and everybody on the zma board we want to have access to the media as well so this is nothing to worry about but as you get better you can also add it as a hidden file and things like that they're only root can read it and so that's a little bit more secure but for this case we're doing it much simpler and it's not a security issue so we're just going to say username that username we came up with on our Nas over here which for me was Plex dzma and then comma password equals and then whatever password you set up so I'm just pasting mine back in and comma a couple of other pieces here we're going to do ISO Char set this is just something that can make it more compatible if you're using non-standard characters in any file names kind of the additional set so we are just going to paste that in there as well and now we're going to add a zero and a zero at the end so hopefully we did everything right let me go ahead and Shrink this on down so you can see everything all right so now what we should have is the IP of the Nas and the folder we're mounting or the host name I call it Nas One the place we're mounting it to on the Zab board CFS the protocol we're using the username and password we set up first anology and then 0 0 at the end with IO Char set utf8 and now we're going to do control X to exit y to sa enter to write it and we're going to do a pseudo Mount d a all right so we did not get an error I got an error last time and so if we we go into Flex media we should see the demo movies all right Perfect all right so right here we are able to see all the files directly in here and so that means that the Plex is going to be able to see it so we should be able to do a pseudo reboot and assuming I know what I'm doing this should Mount exactly the same as soon as we reboot so that means that this is just going to work internally and we can hook up Plex to just manage this directly and we're pretty much going to be done after this all right so a quick dumb debug later I accidentally had my back slashes as forward slashes or my forward slashes as back slashes because well Linux and windows cannot figure out which one they want to use for that but it should be forward SL slash it was very odd it was working with a pseudo Mount during the file system was up but it would not mount on reboot long story short I also added file mode and deer mode to 777 I will leave a link to this down in the description below probably on my Forum site that has all of this that you need and when we do a reboot it does successfully work now just fine one of those dumb things it takes forever to debug and finally finally got it which was just a huge pain all right so now that you've got this done you should reboot it and be able to just see that the movies are there perfect now the last thing we have to do is go ahead and add this to Plex so we're going to go back into Plex and I'm going to pop open to my zma board section right over here and what we've got over here is I'm going to go ahead and now add that library for this one it is just a general one where is my library right here so I'm just going to add in a other videos and now we should be able to map to it so it's under root MNT Flex media and if you see a folder in there or anything you know you're good and so now we should see this so let's go ahead and just play this thing so we'll see that we've got the exact same stuff mapped in both places so up here is actually directly I installed Plex on my DS 923 plus that's running this and it's got the same CPU as this DS1 1522 plus so they should perform identically poorly because they do not have hardware transcoding and what once we give this a second to actually figure out everything that's on in there we will also be able to go ahead and play this right off of it and see what kind of performance we get so the one that absolutely destroyed it is the one for YouTube I could not get this thing to play off the DS 923 Plus at all and let's go ahead and just try it out so I'm going to go ahead and hit play this is playing off the zma board and this is what I upload to Youtube and you can see it's an insanely High megabit rate I basically just give YouTube as much information as possible in the hopes that when they compress it hopefully it'll be better so I'm going back to convert maximum and I'm going to hit play on this and see if we can play back real time now this is is going to be tough for it because as you saw it's massive file size and the way to tell is this bar right there is telling us if it is increasing that means it's actually going to be able to play it back for good and it seems like it may be staying steady state we're probably hitting right at the maximum of this zema board right now and we can also check and see that it is in fact Hardware transcoding by coming into our dashboard and right here we can see that it is using Hardware transcoding which is the only reason why the CPU is able to handle this so we can see that buffer has stayed out through the entire time let's go to that exact same video now hosted on the actual DS 923 Plus and we're going to see a very different experience so this is it playing directly off the DS 923 plus convert maximum exact same settings we can see that our CPU is completely pinned and we are not going to be able to successfully get up there so if you look Plex is going to be choppy playback yep there's choppy playback it is unable to keep up that is because it is not able to use the hardware trans coding so now maybe we even drop this down to something simpler like let's just go 720p medium you can see it's just taking a ton of time to do all of this because even this and you can see how poor this video quality is is still having to take this absurdly massive file and down sample it it is really struggling here still it looks like it's going to be able to do it but just barely if we look at some more reasonable stuff where I actually kind of did a couple of other compressions here that that should help so this one was generated in let's go to the 1080p one I think that should be the most reasonable one I basically generated the same video in a lot of file different formats basically I've got two files here that are uh 1080p so now we're going to try a much more reasonable 1080p file with this first we're going to try on the DS 923 plus directly all right and it's playing original we do need to transcode it to show this difference but that is one good thing to know if you're never transcoding and you're direct playing everything it's not that much of a help other than CPU offloading and some stuff like that but it's going to be pretty negligible overall but let's go ahead and just transcode this for the sake of this demonstration all right so I'm trans coding a 1080p file and the DS 923 plus does appear to be able to handle it itself it is transcoding 1080 to 1080 though if we do look over here our CPU is pinned to 100% so now let's go ahead and just look at that exact same file on the zma board and we're going to upscale it in the exact same way or transcode in this case in the exact same way we can see it is still able to handle it we look at the Zab board dashboard our system Plex is not using a massive amount of resources anymore because we are Hardware transcoding this thing it makes it much easier we would be able to support much more streams on Linux and windows and we're using Linux right now there's no appreciable upper limit on how how many streams you can do at least from a technical limitation it's all going to be based off the performance of your GPU transcoding so just right there we do have the ability and you can just see there are times where this is super valuable and times that it's not but one real Advantage is right now we are transcoding this thing and if we look at our DS 923 it's got no CPU usage Because the actual zemma board right here is offloading all that responsibility all right well that's going to be it we have now just set up your Plex Media Server on your Zab board and now you have access to all your media right on there thanks to zard for sponsoring this tutorial if you have any other questions leave them down in the comments below one last thing I'm going to recommend doing is right now it's got the default username of Casa OS and default password of Casa OS I would recommend changing those as well as logging into actual Casa OS which I didn't even get to which is kind of like a Synology interface I I would recommend loging in here and when you log in for the very first time you also get prompted to change your password I would just recommend those two things if this is just a lab environment and you know if somebody from your local network wants to mess with it it's not a big of a deal it is just very good practice to get into and this is now also an isolated system off of our nass so even if Plex does have vulnerability detected in it it does not have direct access to the nas like it would if you had vulnerability within syy DSM and Plex though ever since DSM 7.0 which broke Plex for a lot of people that has gotten even further isolated all right well that's it go A and leave any other questions you got for me down in the comments below and have a good one [Music] bye

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 34,479

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Id: nuIkV3ZCowE

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2023