HTPC and VM Advice

[CamiKaze]

I need some advice on whether this is a good idea or not, what I might be missing or a better idea.

I have Windows 8.1 installed in a VM Where I have Sonarr and SabNZBD installed.
The purpose of this VM is to download all the latest series, movies and music.
I also do not like to install a lot of apps on my base install and would rather have most of my stuff on a VM for if ever I need to reinstall my base and not go through this media center setup again.

I will install Plex soon to monitor my media folder. The media folder is found within a drive that is in the base install (Windows 8.1 as well but will soon be installing Windows 10 as the base). In other words, Plex (inside the VM) will monitor my media folder in the base install of Windows.

For some reason, I think that there will be a huge bottleneck in having Plex installed in the VM as opposed to having it in the base install.
My reason for this is that when streaming to other devices, Plex will not be able to decode the content efficiently.

Should I install Plex on the base install? Secondly, is all the above mentioned a good approach with trying to get everything that is media related inside a VM or should I rather move everything over to the base install and forget about the VM in total?

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

You will always lose some performance in a VM, what VM platform are you using?

 

[CamiKaze]

Virtual Box.

Ok it looks like I should use the VM for downloading only and let Sab drop the downloaded content into my base install folder.
Then run Plex on the base install.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

You are always going to get top performance running Plex on the base OS but it's not always a bad thing to have it running on a VM, sometimes it will make sense.

In your situation I wouldn't recommend running it on a VM though, there is no compelling reason to do so. Plex will also now be able to communicate directly with your base filesystem.

 

[CamiKaze]

This actually got me thinking, the decoding of content on the PC does not matter?

If my LG tv has media link (powered by Plex) then the TV is the device that does the decoding right?
My SS plugin can still be accessed by the TV when running Plex inside the VM as well.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

If my LG tv has media link (powered by Plex) then the TV is the device that does the decoding right?

No it's not that simple. The TV will support a certain range of containers and codecs, those which cannot be directly supported by the TV will have to be transcoded by Plex on the server. For instance an easy example to give is h265 (or HEVC). Your TV cannot directly decode this, so Plex will have to transcode this into something the TV can play.

 

[CamiKaze]

No it's not that simple. The TV will support a certain range of containers and codecs, those which cannot be directly supported by the TV will have to be transcoded by Plex on the server. For instance an easy example to give is h265 (or HEVC). Your TV cannot directly decode this, so Plex will have to transcode this into something the TV can play.

Makes sense, thanks.

 

[Noah]

Have you thought about maybe getting an old i5/i7(can get them for R300~ on carbonite) with VT-d and running VM's off it via vSphere etc?

 

[CamiKaze]

Nah the machine that I'm busy with is for running 2 VMs and an HTPC.

The next machine is for gaming only.

 

[Noah]

Hmmm, have you tried giving the VM more oomph?
afaik Plex is heavy on IO, It has tons of tiny little files that it reads for metadata ontop of reading the actual media file for decoding.
Then the transcoder has an initial burst of CPU usage while it decodes and buffers. Slower CPUs might delay in the beginning of the stream but then it should even out.

 

[CamiKaze]

Hmmm, have you tried giving the VM more oomph?
afaik Plex is heavy on IO, It has tons of tiny little files that it reads for metadata ontop of reading the actual media file for decoding.
Then the transcoder has an initial burst of CPU usage while it decodes and buffers. Slower CPUs might delay in the beginning of the stream but then it should even out.

Yeah I pretty much figured out my setup. I'm going to either create a shared drive or save the downloaded files directly to a network drive, plex will then be installed on the base install and monitor from said base instead of from inside the VM. That will sort out all the necessary decoding that plex/cpu has to do.

 

[CamiKaze]

Is a Hyper-V VM (VHDX file) compatible with other applications like Virtual Box and other VM programs?
Thinking of creating a Windows 10 VM for Sonarr and Sabnzbd and running this VM on a Linux Host.

Tried creating a Linux Mint VM but F### me endless issues

 

[Anthro]

My Setup:
N54L HP Microserver, 8GB RAM 4x4TB drives for various media
3x Network Cards (RED, GREEN, BLUE interfaces)

VMWare ESXi hosting pFSense Firewall, Windows 10

Windows 10 Box running:
Emby Media Server (this rocks by the way)
QBittorrent
Sonarr
sabNzbd+
CouchPotato
FileBot for renaming and scripting
Google Drive - monitoring certain folder for .torrent files, deletes them when picked up, so I can enque stuff i find wherever

Utillize the Web interface of Emby to watch my shows, and push them to Chromecast as well
I even stream to my devices over WiFi - no issues with speed, or stutter from transcoding (when required)

 

[CamiKaze]

Is a Hyper-V VM (VHDX file) compatible with other applications like Virtual Box and other VM programs?
Thinking of creating a Windows 10 VM for Sonarr and Sabnzbd and running this VM on a Linux Host.

Tried creating a Linux Mint VM but F### me endless issues

Anyone?