New to 4K and Serviio could use some advice about PC specs

Hi all. To begin, I have tried looking for an answer to my question but I'm new to both 4K and Serviio in general so I'm not sure if the posts I have found are of much use to me. I apologise if I'm retreading old ground, but would be grateful for any help you guys can offer in relation to minimum required specs.



I am currently streaming videos from my gaming laptop to my shiny new Samsung TU7020, which has been amazing, but the laptop will not always be available in the house. As there is another TU7020 being added to the home network in the next couple of days I was thinking about repurposing some old PC parts to act as a permanent home server for when I and my laptop are away. Searching for answer brings me a lot of posts (here and elsewhere) about transcoding, but I'm not sure if that is a requirement for my needs as many of those posts mention transcoding to 1080p, which I do not require.



So (finally) my question is this: what would be the minimum PC specs required to stream 4K to two TVs on my home network?

Bonus question: If the source file is 4K and both of the viewers are watching in 4K is there any transcoding involved?showbox speed test



Sorry again if I'm beating a dead horse, but, should that be the case, I would appreciate it if someone could point me toward a post that would guide a noob in the right direction as I'm a bit lost in the long grass right now.

[atc98092]

Welcome, and no question is ever a bother if asked honestly.

In general, a media streaming computer doesn't require a lot of processor power. If the files do not require transcoding, a simple dual-core CPU computer lying in the closet would likely be more than enough. It's when transcoding is necessary you start having computer power concerns. If it's only audio transcoded, it's not really power hungry. It's video transcoding that really needs the horsepower.

So, it really comes down to the media content you want to stream. Let's take the worst case scenario: streaming a ripped UHD movie to a player that doesn't support 4K. That is going to push almost any computer hard, and depending on the target video codec used it might be difficult to stream more than one at a time. But your TV(s) support 4K, so should support the H.265 video codec used on UHD movie discs. What your TV will not support is the lossless audio that your UHD movies likely contain, so the audio would have to be transcoded to standard Dolby Digital. Again, that doesn't take a lot of horsepower, so streaming to multiple TVs should be no big deal.

It appears your TV supports eARC, which means that if you connect an AVR that also supports eARC via HDMI, in theory that lossless audio should be passed to the AVR, so no transcoding at all would be required. Almost any old computer could likely stream to a dozen of sets like that at one time. But I've never played with eARC, so I would assume it's up to the TV manufacturer to support sending the lossless audio back to an AVR. And Samsung doesn't have a great reputation for their DLNA support overall.

Now, one last thing to mention. Streaming ripped UHD movies takes a lot of bandwidth. My UHD rips are pretty steady at around 70 Mbps, with peak bitrates getting close to 200. That's far more than Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) can handle. So your media computer needs a Gigabit Ethernet adapter, and your wired network also needs to be Gigabit. You might, just might, get away with 100 Mbps on a single stream, but there's no way it could handle two at one time. Also be aware that your TV most likely only has a 100 Mbps Ethernet connection, so streaming UHD rips might only be possible using WiFi. I can't find the specs to be sure, but if the TV supports it you should use 802.11ac as the WiFi protocol, since it supports the highest possible speeds. But your media computer should really be hard-wired with Gigabit Ethernet to the WiFi access point.