On 8/3/2020 4:45 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
A BPi can stand as a media server, but I don't recommend it in
general. A media server to a very limited number of clients does
not need much I/O power, but if it needs to recode a video on the
fly, a BPi is going to be really hard pressed to keep up,
especially if it is attempting to serve multiple streams.
In my case the videos aren't recoded on the fly by the media server, so
That frees up a lot of breathing room
this is not an issue. In theory, recoding on the fly should be possible
(at least for some combinations of input/output formats), tho, using
the A20'a VPU. I never tried, tho.
Still, recoding doesn't seem to justify 15GB in addition to the 1GB of
my server.
Memory is pretty cheap these days, although single board computers have
very limited memory expansion options. I have quite a few Raspberry Pi
hosts and a couple of Banana Pi hosts, but none of them are deployed as
media servers.
I'm not saying 16GB can't be useful in a NAS (I don't assume my use case
to be the same as the OP's, for example), I'm just pointing out that it
can be massively overkill for some NAS scenarios, so it's a bad idea to
recommend it without first knowing what the usage will look like.
Absolutely, but it is not expensive overkill. Desktop memory can cost
as little as $30 for 16G.