run playon on npvr box?

[johnsonx42]

Hey Martin,

I've decided to finally give Universe and PlayOn a serious try. I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on running the PlayOn server on the main NPVR box. How heavy is it? Does Universe have any problem connecting back to PlayOn on the same computer?

[mvallevand]

I've never had any problems running PlayOn on my NPVR server (showing as Low on the PlayOn test screen) so that is where I run it, but I also didn't have problems running from my ION PC client. I suspect the question comes down to how heavily loaded your post processing is, especially for comskip and for those that use it Handbrake etc transcoding.

For playback after transcoding it is standard SD mpeg-2 which most video cards will play with little system impact. The file is played directly from the PlayOn UPnP web server and the server's location doesn't matter, unless there are restrictive firewalls in place. On the local machine it does stream from localhost.

The PlayOn trial is by PC so if you have problems on your host PC you can always try another.

Martin

[johnsonx42]

Thanks Martin, and thanks also for the nice plugin.

I've gotten it working now; for the initial tryout I did just install Playon on my regular desktop. I do see that when I'm watching something it uses most of one CPU core (2ghz dual core) to do the downloading/transcoding/streaming. The NPVR box is basically the same, just a little faster (2.4ghz), and as it frequently runs 2 comskips at once I may be short on CPU power to do everything on that box. I won't know until I try it of course.

[mvallevand]

Your numbers seem a bit high, here is Oprah and NextPVR running together and I see 25% total for the two of them.

Martin

[johnsonx42]

how many cores is that box?

[mvallevand]

It's an old c2d @E4300 1.8Ghz (Windows experience CPU 5.3 RAM 5.5 and HDD 5.7)

Martin

[johnsonx42]

well I may have looked at the CPU usage when it was particularly busy, or maybe it was doing a tougher transcode than Oprah.

If/when I switch playon to the NPVR box (as my desktop isn't always on), I can always go back to one comskip at a time if the load seems too much.

[mvallevand]

I just tried Netflix (the .ca version wasn't working well with PlayOn on the weekend) and it certainly doesn't use much CPU either.

Martin