Serviio

I have a HP Proliant Server that I with 8GB RAM but just a core i3 processor and worst of all an integrated graphics card that I can not find drivers for (in any OS, although I am running Windows 10 and it is currently running in low display mode, so not ideal).

Thus I am thinking of buying a low end GPU (something like a R7 240), but I want to know, does Serviio offload encoding to the GPU (and thus is it worthwhile to purchase one).

Otherwise i will not bother and just use it as is.

Serviio doesn't use your GPU. The only hardware accelerated encoding support is for Intel QSV (has to be enabled and you must use a compatible version of ffmpeg), which will probably be supported by your i3.

Ok, so I have Serviio running on my server now.

It is running 1.8. The goal is that it will take over media serving duties to my Sony Bravia Android TVs in the house from my MacBook Pro. (Running 1.7)

I was trying to stream a movie from the server and it keeps being unable to play/stream from the server, when the same file from the MacBook Pro works (do have to retry playback a few times for it to work though).

Is this a lack of cores problem for transcoding the file?

Some files steam fine (standard def files, TV shows), the test movie is 1080p and a few GB in filesize.

Is their anything I can do? I can change to a Xeon processor (same single core benchmark but has 4 cores instead of 2) for $10, or get a beefier Xeon with about 50% single core power (and 4 cores) for about $50.

The OS is running on a brand new good SSD which reads and writes around 500MB/s,transcode location on SSD but I have the data stored on a western digital black caviar 2TB drive.

OS is a fresh install of Win 10 Pro.

I might put a R7 240 4GB card in it today as the onboard GPU (now drivers are working) is choppy in windows 10 at displaying the OS. It's a shame you can't offload the transcoding to GPU, it's a little strange that Serviio is unable to do that in 2017!

The Xeon upgrade, especially for that price, would be worthwhile. But for the files that won't play at all, I'm thinking the incorrect profile is selected. Before I upgraded my test server, it was only a dual core AMD with 4 gig of ram, and while I occasionally encountered some buffering (pretty rare) it would still play everything.

Ok, that's weird. I never had to play with any profile settings on the MacBook Pro,

How are profiles managed?

Using the Serviio console, which can be opened from any computer on the network using http://PC_name_or_IP_address:23423/console.

From there, go to the Status tab and find your device in the Connected Devices list. It's always possible that it is mis-identifed by Serviio, because not everything identifies itself accurately, if at all. There are quite a number of Sony profiles, so you might need to experiment until you find one that works well. With the Sony profiles, I've found that the newer the profile the less transcoding is performed. This is due to improvements each year by Sony. Other manufacturers do the same thing.

File size shouldn't be an issue. I have a number of m2ts files that are uncompressed Blu Ray rips that get close to 40 GB. Depending on the age of your Sony, it may not support higher bitrates. The profile should take that into account.