Raspberry Pi Forums

Hey All,

So I've been using the Pi 2 Model B for a while now with my nas and Kodi and I'm loving it. I want to get a few of these around my apartment on different screens for watching shows off my NAS (maybe evening multiple Pis pulling media of a single NAS simultanously). Couple questions:

1- Which is the cheapest Pi I could use to get smooth performance on Kodi while streaming HD media?

2- Where will I hit a bottleneck? I'm assuming if I have 2-3 pi's streaming full HD video off 1 nas it should be fine, but throughput might be a problem. Some info:

SATA throughout is iether 300 or 600MB/s depending on the version
The pi is only 100MB unless you use external adapters
I'm planning to connect to a WB My Cloud for budget reasons rather than a synology or the like.
Network I'm running on is gigabit
Cables are all cate5e and cat 6

How many Raspberry Pis can I have streaming content off of one MyBookLive? Will my numbers improve if I get a bigger NAS?

Help is much appreciated.

Thanks,

Looking at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8GZr2fyUY0 - it seems a $5 Pi Zero will run Kodi just fine ( you could grab one of those nifty 3-port USB hub + ethernet adapters that plug directly into the OTG port to cut down a little on clutter) - it's certainly worth grabbing one to try out (they should be back in stores on Monday, although who knows how long they'll be in stock for...) before splashing out on a bunch of Pi 3's

The number you can run at once is going to be dependent on the bandwidth of the videos you're watching (I've got "HD" movies using different encodings with anything up to ten times the size difference in the files). At a rough guess through you ought to be fine for at least half a dozen simultaneously streaming, and if multiple Pis are watching the same thing you should benefit from some read caching on the NAS.

I can't see a bigger NAS helping things, a second NAS (especially if running off cabled, switched gigabit ethernet) is more likely to help saturate that gigabit bandwidth as you've then doubled the size of anything that could be a bottleneck. From what I understand, it's more likely you'll hit your first bottleneck somewhere between the NAS motherboard and the gigabit network (meaning, it's ability to process the data it's reading off the drive and push it through its network card), rather than the speed it can read from the disk or the network itself.

I am currently using:

Raspberry Pi 3 (direct connected to my Router (although you can use WiFi as well))
OSMC (https://osmc.tv/)

OSMC is a custom version of Kodi that allows you to overclock your RPi 3. This coupled with full HD (1080p) capability, makes viewing Kodi flawless.

For a custom Kodi Build, go to YouTube and subscribe to:

TopTutorials (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QRG- ... -BPdmJfs1w)

He has created a custom build called Hyper TT that makes everything easier. You will find the video showing you how to install the latest build with a quick overview opf the build. Plus TT seems to update the build on a regular. I rarely, if ever, find broken links.

I have recommended and installed the above for friends and family. They are all happy with it.