G’day,
Have just discovered roon and it looks like it will be a brilliant solution to managing my music collection of ripped CDs and LPs.
Does roon have any plans to expand to do the same thing for managing a DVD and Blu-ray collection?
If not, what are people here using to do that?
Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.
I use Plex. It’s pretty awesome … very similar benefits though it’s mostly free. I actually pay for PlexPass which entitles you to local offline sync and has been great when traveling for taking some video on the go.
Plex does music too and I have my stuff in there as well, but Roon kills for quality and access …
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G’day,
So can Plex and roon live together on a Roon Optimized Core Kit?
Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.
It’s a tempting, but not necessarily good idea.
Admitting it’s possible to run Plex Server on ROCK’s slimmed-down version of Linux, given how much space a video library takes, and how much ressources (heat…) transcoding video requires, you’ll likely be dealing with something considerably bigger and noisier than a NUC.
There are both commercial (Synology, Qnap and certainly others) and DIY options (FreeNas and UnRaid come to mind) which’d probably be a better idea to explore if one box that does it all is what you’re after.
G’day,
I already have two Synology NAS units used for file storage. My music and video files will be on those. (More Synology NAS units will be added as required.) The NUC running rock would access the music files stored on the Synology NAS units.
I can use other computers to do ripping. So I guess it really comes down to where any video transcoding needs to happen.
Planning to deliver the music files from the rock NUC in my study over Ethernet to a microRendu attached to a suitable DAC and into my home AV system in the lounge room. Any recommendations for a suitable DAC would be gratefully received. (Like the look of the Australian made Gieseler Klein DAC II, but don’t know if it’s roon ready.)
Thought I might be able to do something similar for the video. That is, the transcoding happens on an Ethernet connected device hooked up via HDMI to the home AV system. Possible or not?
Then the NUC would just be doing video (Plex) and music (roon) file management and streaming.
But I’m a complete newbie to this computer based music and video stuff. So I’m not sure what can and can’t be done. I just know what I’d like to be able to do.
Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.
Yes, this is what Plex does. You have a server in the basement, and, say, a Roku or a RaspBerry Pi or an nVidia Shield or an AppleTV hooked up to your receiver’s HDMI in.
It’s a bit the same philosophy as Roon: you have a big computer stashed away somewhere, and then you can spread small and cheap devices around to play things back (or superfast devices that don’t need to have big, noisy drives with lots of fans to cool everything down if you’re doing upscaling, but that’s a whole other can of worms).
The main difference between audio and video, as far as you’re concerned, is size: RedBook FLAC is, give or take, 300 or 400 megabytes an hour. 1080p BluRay is around 30 gigabytes, so, give or take, 100 times more. Here again, the point where a Synology’s cost / performance becomes not worth it is reached rather fast, hence the earlier suggestion to look at other solutions.
With Plex, transcoding happens on the server. If you’re playing back on a computer, or a device that’s very compatible, format-wise, you might be able to get away with a Synology (check the Plex forums to see exactly which models you’d need for your use case), but if you want to go from, say, Plex to an AppleTV or an iPad, and want subtitles, you’ll quickly be in trouble, especially if you have kids who also want to do the same at the same time. Any video processing (so the stuff that isn’t meant strictly for compatibility, think upscaling / denoising / color correction / whatever) would happen on the playback device, and, as I said earlier, that’s another can of worms and something much more suited for AVForum than the Roon Community site.
No: the NUC would be doing video and music transcoding/upscaling/room correction/whatever and video transcoding and handling two massive databases of metadata, and god knows what else.
ROCK is limited, and for good reason: it makes it predictable, it makes it stable, it makes it possible for you to go buy a cheap NUC off the shelf and have an appliance that’s supported and would otherwise have cost you a couple of grand from someone who buys an HDPLEX or a Streacom case and marks it up.
It is good the way it is, so unless you really know what you’re doing, you’re probably better off letting it do its thing.
If you’re willing to invest time, you can McGyver something that’s pretty damn integrated and very high quality, for much, much less than what you’d be looking at off-the-shelf is what can be done. Want a few thousand BluRays with full metadata information, controlled from an iPad and piped to a color-corrected 4k display device with Atmos sound and room correction ? Doable - hell, I’m sure there’s a plugin somewhere to dim the lights for you.
Plex here as well.
Plex and Roon can coexist on the same server but you definitely want to give it allot of power. Video is a different beast and needs allot of processor if you are going to be transcoding for devices and or streaming out of your house. Understanding trancoding and when plex does it is important, you’ll just end up wishing you had done things differently if you under build.
Many people run plex server on a NAS but they are the same persons continually complaining on the Plex forums.
I have a 6 core i7 based plex server that can trancode 4-5 blu-rays to 720p at one time. This same machine struggles doing 1 4k trancode to 1080p.
Thanks guys. For now I’m just setting up Roon ROCk and doing audio only. Will look into video down the track when is can be more easily handled. Again, thanks for explaining it to a noob.