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Hetzner and Plex
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Hetzner and Plex

XenosXenos Member

I currently have Plex running on an LV slice at BuyVM and the CPU can't keep up with the transcoding. Would I run into an issue with a server from Hetzner streaming to a Plex client in the southern US due to the distance?

Comments

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    Best for you to test on a Hetzner cloud VM to see if direct stream works well or not. I only get 70Mbps from Hetzner DE to my home in Texas.

  • Honestly Plex uses buffering for the video stream. Just give the test file a few tries at different times of day and see if the bandwidth will be enough for your videos but rate.

    And if al else fails Hetzner allows 14 day cancellation no questions asked.

  • Upgrade to a dedicated vCpu slice ?

  • I have Plex running on a hetzner dedi in Germany and I'm in Australia. The routing is horrible.

    However, I discovered nginx on a VPS in an ideal location improved things significantly.

    Right now I have it going through cloudflare and it's purring.

    Tl;dr hetzner is great.

  • williewillie Member

    I don't recommend this across the Atlantic. I have a Kimsufi i5-3570S at BHS Canada that I use for stuff like that. It's much better because of the closer distance.

  • XenosXenos Member

    Thanks guys! I downloaded one of their test files that started off well, but leveled off at 55K.

  • pikepike Veteran

    I had an rtmp relay running on a hetzner dedi and it worked well for many US clients.

  • @dahartigan said:
    I have Plex running on a hetzner dedi in Germany and I'm in Australia. The routing is horrible.

    However, I discovered nginx on a VPS in an ideal location improved things significantly.

    Right now I have it going through cloudflare and it's purring.

    Tl;dr hetzner is great.

    Reverse proxy?

  • @terrorgen said:

    @dahartigan said:
    I have Plex running on a hetzner dedi in Germany and I'm in Australia. The routing is horrible.

    However, I discovered nginx on a VPS in an ideal location improved things significantly.

    Right now I have it going through cloudflare and it's purring.

    Tl;dr hetzner is great.

    Reverse proxy?

    Yes nginx is set up as a reverse proxy. You need a rather long config file for nginx but it works nicely.

    Then cloudflare with no caching, only using it for routing purposes as my ISP and many others peer with cloudflare and in my case during peak hour it makes a drastically significant improvement.

    I'm talking Brisbane to Germany at peak times is around 50 kilobytes per second, and during off peak time is around 1 megabyte per second.

    With cloudflare I get closer to 10 megabytes per second regardless of the time of day.

    YMMV.

  • EHRAEHRA Member

    @dahartigan, could you indicate a tutorial to accomplish this?

  • Dang I need to learn how to do it, seems like I am missing out a useful tool.

  • @EHRA said:
    @dahartigan, could you indicate a tutorial to accomplish this?

    This is the nginx config: https://github.com/toomuchio/plex-nginx-reverseproxy/blob/master/nginx.conf

    As for a tutorial, I don't recall using one but if you get stuck shoot me a PM. If I get enough people PM me about it I'll end up writing one myself (which usually happens lol)

    Thanked by 3terrorgen ITLabs EHRA
  • dahartigan said: With cloudflare I get closer to 10 megabytes per second regardless of the time of day.

    You need to make sure tho that you do a Cache level bypass for the plex server on cloudflare. If you start cacheing a "disproportionate" amount of non-HTML files they are going to nuke your account and once terminated there is no chance to ever get back on the platform. If you do it right you should have 0 cached bandwidth for your plex subdomain.

  • I have a relatively large Plex following on Hetzner and I'm on the West Coast through Cloudflare. Totally doable and livable, not even that bad of an issue!

  • williewillie Member

    Looks like KS7 (i3-2xxx), 15 euro or KS10 (i5-2xxx, 3570S in practice it seems) are available at BHS right now. The i3 is 2 cores and the i5 is 4 cores at slightly lower clock. Both have 1x2TB disk. I got the i5 one on flash sale a while back, and it looks like there's a flash sale going on right now (France only) and these should be fine for plex. I use my i5 for all kinds of transcoding and stuff, and it's a bit slower than my Hetzner i7-3770 but the difference isn't really that significant. It is able to keep its 100 mbit pipe full, while the Hetzner for transatlantic traffic usually can send around 40-50 mbit though I find using more connections can increase this.

  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep

    AU <-> Hetzner goes fine. No Cloudflare (pointless anyway, they won't cache your video stream) required. If we can do it in Australia you can certainly do it the US.

  • @willie said:
    Looks like KS7 (i3-2xxx), 15 euro or KS10 (i5-2xxx, 3570S in practice it seems) are available at BHS right now. The i3 is 2 cores and the i5 is 4 cores at slightly lower clock. Both have 1x2TB disk. I got the i5 one on flash sale a while back, and it looks like there's a flash sale going on right now (France only) and these should be fine for plex. I use my i5 for all kinds of transcoding and stuff, and it's a bit slower than my Hetzner i7-3770 but the difference isn't really that significant. It is able to keep its 100 mbit pipe full, while the Hetzner for transatlantic traffic usually can send around 40-50 mbit though I find using more connections can increase this.

    Waiting for ks-9 BHS

  • @EHRA said:
    @dahartigan, could you indicate a tutorial to accomplish this?

    +1, please do write a tutorial on this. Thanks in advance.

  • williewillie Member

    cybertech said: Waiting for ks-9 BHS

    Have they ever had that? That's the W3520 right? That has ECC, but it benches slower than the i5-3570S and may have fewer SSE/AVX instructions (not sure).

    Thanked by 1cybertech
  • Adam1Adam1 Member

    SplitIce said: No Cloudflare (pointless anyway, they won't cache your video stream) required.

    that's not the only use for cloudflare, their routing is useful

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