 So can the FreeNAS Mini XL Plus with the Intel Atom CPUs, the C3758s at 2.2 gigahertz with eight cores, can that run Plex at 4K? Can it do any transcoding? Can it do on the fly transcoding down to maybe a lower resolution? Short answer is yes. And we're gonna get into the details of it. So too long didn't watch. Yes, you can stop watching here. If that's the only thing you wanted to know, I'm not a clickbait person. We'll make you watch a longer video. I will just tell you upfront that it will do it. But let's talk about the details and some of the limitations and just how fast it will do it and just how many 4K streams we can run. And we'll get into that as soon as you click the like button to help drive the algorithm to let other people know that they would like to watch this video as well. Helps me a lot with the channel and click subscribe if you wanna see more videos and content from my channel. All right, back to the content. So this specific machine is the FreeNAS Mini XL Plus. As I said with the Intel Atoms, does have 32 gigs of RAM in there. And we have a GL set up with Plex in it. We also are running and we'll go over here to the drives just to show the storage pool we have set up. Western Digital Reds. So these are a ZFS2 configuration. So we'll look at the status real quick. Just, you know, it's a ZFS RAID Z2 setup. And these are just the 5400 RPM, not the real fast drives, just some basic NAS drives. But for video, that works perfectly fine and we have a drives here. Then we have a folder called video editing test, which I was using in a previous video to edit videos. And since I had a bunch of videos on there, I pointed Plex at them. So I don't have to worry about copyright of any other videos that you may want to watch with Plex. But because some of these videos are at 4K and high res and other ones are at 1080, it gives us some different variables to test with. Now, setting up Plex. Let's go over that real quick. I may be able to do a further video in depth about it, but the short answer is you go to the available plugins, choose Plex, click install, which I already did that part. Once installed, it shows up here and you can go to the management and that opens up a new window with the Plex install. But the part that people get confused about, the tricky part is how jails manage mount points. So we've already created the mount point and I'll show you how we do that. So we go here to the mount point and what they mean by source and destination. A jail sits nested within slash MNT, tank IO cage jails, Plex, root slash MNT, videos where we have it mounted to and here is the video editing test folder that's under slash MNT, tank video editing. How do you do that? We're gonna go here and edit and show it a little bit closer here. So anytime you have a jail and this is part of the security of the jail system, it doesn't have access to data. It sits in its own jail, much like the name implies. And that jail keeps it out of being in other places. So you have to take your existing storage and in this case, it's slash MNT, tank video editing, video editing test, actually. We click there as the source. We're taking all those video editing tests and we're mapping it to the inside of the jail. And we went here to MNT and I just made a folder called video. So by selecting this, that's how we get the two different locations. How does that look inside of Plex? Well, even though we see this long path because we're mapping it in here, what Plex sees is we're gonna go here, we're gonna look at other videos and we're gonna edit folders and that says MNT slash videos. So that's all you really have to do. Plex can't see further back than MNT but when you're mapping the storage, it's MNT slash tank slash IO cage slash Plex slash root. Then the MNT is being added on here. So Plex starts where MNT starts here, root slash MNT versus this is the entire path of where everything is. It can be a little bit confusing. There's more in-depth videos I've done on how the jail system works or how to mount storage back and forth inside of there on Freeness. But you kind of get the idea that I at least wanted to cover that because people always ask about how did you get it set up? Now this is net data which comes built in to Freeness and we're gonna be use this to see the CPU usage of the watching the Plex videos. And we'll close this here and here's a variety of videos I have. Just kind of some miscellaneous random ones. I threw like the old video me and Corey we'll start from beginning when we did the wall video. So here is no problem. This is a 1080 video actually. Let me turn the sound off. All right, this is a 1080 video. No problem on the playback works perfectly fine. I can seek ahead. It's pretty much instant. And we can see just that's just a blip to Freeness in terms of playback. In my computer is no problem handling 1080 content. Well, I should say the browser. It's not just the computer. It's when we play it back in the browser. This is a higher rate 1080. So it's actually 60 frames a second but I'm recording at 30 so it probably doesn't look any different to you but it plays this perfectly fine. No problem and we can go here and see this is a 45 megs per second at 1080 HD and still same thing. Doesn't really affect Freeness, the Freeness many much but when we go up here and let's play something at 4K content this is where my computer will start to have a problem. Now the Freeness is not doing much here. Freeness is barely peaking anymore sending the content. There's always the initial seek of when it loaded the content but you can see that the browser starts jerking a little bit and that's because it can't handle 4K the at the 60 meg rate that is coming in at it and it's just a browser limitation. So it's gonna go a little bit. You see it kind of jerking and not going well. So here's the test. Can the Freeness can these Intel Atom processors down sample this to something that my browser can handle like 1080 at eight megabits? Sure, let's give that a try. So we're converting on a fly. This was not pre-transcoded or pre-loaded and there it goes. It's going, going, going, hit play. Get a second to buffer here. Perfectly smooth because now it's handling it because now it's sending it at a rate that my system can handle. Now what does that do to the Freeness? Well, when you're taking 4K and sampling it down to something else that does, well, pull some CPU. So it looks like it hits the CPU. It peaked out when it started buffering we'll keep it playing here. Actually we'll pop this window out and see where this is at now while it keeps playing. Get it down here. Actually you gotta also move these windows all around. Set this to settings. Always with that means is when to refresh the charge that way the charge keep going even when I'm not on that screen so the work behind the screen. So we're still playing back nice and smooth here and you know we're probably keeping this at the 70% but what if we open up another window? Well that then choke it. Is it still responsive at all while it's doing this powerhouse over here reducing the video? Let's play another video. Actually just pop this out. So that one stays playing. Let's move it over a little bit and then we'll play something else. Let's play this one now. Start from beginning. And this one's playing now. So this one, let me rewind it so it starts over. It didn't stop, they're just getting out of the car so we'll actually play this one over. Jump backwards. It's got a buffer again because it's not saving any of the transcoding it's done but we're stressing the machine a little bit here so okay now this one's playing. Let's do this. Let's get another video playing. Plex is still responsive. It's easily loading other videos. Ami and Corey having some beer after work here. That's actually part of this video where we did that. So here's another video playing. So we got that video transcoding down to a lower bit rate so it's re-encoding it. This one's playing perfectly fine and we're peaking out the CPU about 90% but it's still completely responsive so we'll wind it open another one. Let's choose a different video again. So go to other videos. Let's choose something else. What do we got here? Some with a drill. Oh that's a short video, let's find a longer one. I'm not sure what Corey's doing here. There we go. Another drill video so now we're playing one, two, three, four and one down sampling to another rate and I mean we're not stressing out the freelance much. Matter of fact, because this video is towards the end the buffers already caught up and it went back down to hardly doing anything. So yes, you can not only play multiple streams so if you had multiple devices for playback, multiple TVs in your house, one Mini XL would certainly handle it. Yes, it can on the fly do the encoding even at 4K down sampled which is not always what you're doing. Most of the time with me I'm playing things back if I have something natively 4K and I do have a 4K TV at home. It'll just play it back natively on there or in some cases even though you have 4K content the device itself will just down sample it depending on what your playback device is to another rate but the point really is these atom processors despite not being particularly fast processors obviously they're working perfectly fine. So we're able to see all this going out. Actually I hear the motorcycle in the background start closing all these windows. All this stuff I got open. Yeah, this is playing perfectly. Anything that's not being trans-coded still plays perfectly fine or re-encoded I should say. So that's all working perfectly fine and we didn't completely stress this machine out. We had a couple of peaks when we pulled all of that but clearly you can run all these streams all at once on this system and, ooh, CPU temperature. Did we raise the CPU temperature a little bit? Not enough, not even enough to be significant. We did see a little bit of load over here on these charts. Here's the CPU temperature. So we went from before I started this video 34, we hit 39 and it's cooling right back off there. So not even in any type of danger zone going from 34 to 39 degrees centigrade that's really nothing for these processors. They can generally get a lot hotter now that you want them to without any real problem. So at least this gives you an idea though though yes it can handle it, yes it works well. Not any problems with it. Real-world testing, that's some benchmarks that tell you that well that processor's slow, it'll never do it. It comes down to all the different instruction sets on a ship set, the optimization of the software whether or not it's good for that CPU. And these Intel CPUs don't have any problems handling the media codecs that Plex uses to do the encoding and that's all I want to do is kind of prove that point that yes it'll work fine inside of here. So if you're considering this box, it's still a good purchase, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. 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