Options for sharing Kodi library between devices

When you choose addon mode instead of native mode, you will sync watch status immediately and you can check it within the dashboard even.

Native seems to be a special hack so you can use direct nfs/smb connection instead of the http stream you would otherwise get.

I have been testing with reverse proxy and DoVi/HDR10 transcoding, it doesn’t always work within Kodi, but no idea yet what is causing the issues.
Not that I would use transcoding that often, but would be nice if all would work as expected.

But I quite like Jellyfin over a MariaDB instance, everything happens on the server instead on the client. Triggering an update from Radarr/Sonarr and sync with Trakt the watch status as an extra backup.
And of course the transcoding is nice for lets say an iPad when you doing gym stuff, so you can watch an episode of a tv serie.

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Useful, thanks. I guess it would also help my RPi 3 play 1080p x265 content as Jellyfin would transcode it on my NAS? The RPi 3 will only play 720p x265 content.

You could indeed choose HEVC/x265 which should be transcoded, but then you would need hardware based transcoding support on your server.

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Running a DS9xx+ NAS so should have more than enough headroom in the CPU to do it.

Depends, I got a DS920+ which does indeed work perfect for it, I know the DS918+ works nice as well.
But I do know the newer DS923+ don’t work that well.

I found this Google Sheet officially updated by Plex, which could help.

Perfect, I have the DS918+.

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The DS920+ has an Intel UHD 600 which will allow Intel Quicksync HW encoding, if the formats are supported by the software. Performance won’t be great but for certain use cases Quicksync can provide some performance improvement for transcoding. TheDS923+ is going to do transcoding in software not hardware. It do not have any GPUs. Is this an issue ? That is hard to say. When transcoding with DLNA servers there are two modes and multiple methods. The two modes are on-the-fly and pretranscoding.

I try never to transcode but when I do (for certain endpoint renderers) I always pretranscode with a very granular set of controls. Whether a DLNA server can pretranscode is up to the DLNA server. I don’t believe Jellyfin can pretranscode natively but can with some addon software.

Other DLNA servers can, some with very robust management tools but you’ll need to do more research to find out. The advantage of pretranscoding is that it doesn’t transcode on-the-fly which can impact playback performance and you can’t FF/RW during transcoding because the updated new file hasn’t been completely written yet.

Just some things to consider with transcoding.

Thanks,

Jeff

I don’t know about running it from a NAS but Plex server running on my Windows PC transcodes on the fly multiple streams using Intel Quick Sync without any issue at all. It is something pretty common for me when I have more than one person streaming from my library remotely with my modest upload bandwidth. The only issue in my particular setup is that it can’t do hardware HDR to SDR conversion with the Windows server currently and even my six core i5 isn’t quite fast enough to transcode 4K HDR in real time. I’ve read their Linux server supports it though so it may be possible for a NAS with an Intel processor to handle this task. Additionally I think Plex also allows some NAS devices to utilize hardware transcoding without a paid license (Plex Pass) which isn’t the case on other platforms.

Part of the discussion was transcoding down HEVC rips to 1080P playback. That is heavy duty transocding, assuming the HEVC is a 4K UHD full bitrate rip. The 920+ NAS has a Gemini Lake Intel processor in it and that does support HEVC with Quick Sync. Like you, I too do some on-the-fly transcoding for remote usage but I also have a server based approach and not a 2 or 4 core NAS system with close to mobile CPU class processors.

My whole point was that their mileage may vary with on-the-fly transcoding, especially depending upon the source and which form of transcoding (i.e. full transcode, remux etc…) is required for the destination endpoint. Pre-transcoding can remove some of that variability.

Jeff

The DS920+ does transcode with minimal effort indeed, also the HDR to SDR stuff.

Are you doing any full bitrate 4K HEVC transcoding with it ? If so, how is that performance ? Also, during transcoding do FF or RW work ? Just curious, based upon my past experiences.

Jeff

Yup, they work without issues from what I could see.

Also skipping a few seconds/minutes worked without issues, of course it then needs a bit of catching up, but worked surprising well.

Thanks for the info. Your experience is likely due to the destination / target format being transcoded to. Some container formats support seeking in an incomplete file whereas others don’t (or at least not well).

Jeff

So in my case, it’d be transcoding 1080p x265 to 1080p x264 (or 720p x265 which does play fine natively).

The DS918+ that I have runs a Intel Celeron J3455 CPU, so I guess all I can do once I get a few spare hours is install Docker, spin up Jellyfish and see how it goes.