hey everybody it's Lon Seidman and this is our monthly sponsored video from Plex
where I do a deep dive into one of its features and I figured today we would do
an update on the DVR feature because I wanted to see if we could run everything
from this WD My cloud PR 2100 in other words install the Plex server on here
have it do all of our regular media serving but also have this work as the
DVR device we could watch live TV as well as record stuff we're going to see
how this performs at that task and the reason why I'm experimenting with this
thing today is because I am planning on having this device replace my computer
and Windows Media Center installation that I've been using now for about 4
years or so Windows Media Center was discontinued with Windows 10 I'm still
running it on an old Windows 7 laptop the channel guides are not updating as
well as they used to a lot of things that are starting to unravel with this
thing and it's time to make a big transition so this is the first step to
see if the heaviest load can be put on this device and still have a workable
media solution for the household here now I do want to mention in the
interest of full disclosure this is a paid sponsorship from Plex however they
are not reviewing this content before it is posted all the opinions you're about
to hear are my own and the WD PR 2100 is on loan from WD I should also mention
that they are a past sponsor here on the channel we're also going to talk about
the HD homerun television tuner they're also an occasional sponsor here on the
channel as well so with those disclosures out of the way let's get to
work now I reviewed the WD PR 2100 a few months ago and the reason why I'm
choosing this particular NAS device for this overall DVR project is that this is
one of the few NAS devices that supports Hardware transcoding in Plex
and that is a critical feature that's missing from a lot of different NAS
devices out there including many manufactured by WD so this will in
Hardware transcode and allowed multiple streams of video to be transcoded
on-the-fly and I covered that in my initial review so I definitely suggest
checking it out what we're going to take a look at today is how well it handles the
mpeg-2 broadcasts that will come in over the air or possibly from your cable
system we'll see how that stacks up while we're doing
our testing a little later in this review now the first thing you have to
do here though is get Plex onto your My Cloud and they do offer a version through
the WD app store that's a part of your Hardware control panel here but this is
not the most current version so this one is a couple versions behind I believe it
does support the DVR but it's not the most up-to-date one so what I suggest
you do is go over to the Plex website at Plex.TV
and if you go over to downloads you'll see they have a bunch of
prepackaged versions for a number of different NAS devices and we can go and
grab that real real quick so let's go over to download here and I'm going to
now select my WD NAS here so we'll select Western Digital they've got a
bunch of others that you can get as well and you can see here this is the June
28th 2017 edition which is the newest one at the time that I am recording this
video so we're going to choose that package and select the particular NAS
that we're downloading for which is the PR 2100 and what it's going to do now
hopefully is download there it goes download about 120 megabytes or so to my
hard drive here and if I go back to our WD control panel I can install that
particular package manually I think I might have to do this every time there's
a new version but I did find that Plex is keeping things up to date faster on
their website than we're seeing here with the WD app store so there is a
little link here to install an app manually which I'm going to do now and
if we go over to my downloads folder you can see there is a my cloud plex media
server package here about 107 megabytes I stand corrected I'll click OK to that
and you'll see here now it is updating and in a second or two this should be
done and the Plex server will be up and running on the NAS here and what's nice
about this is that it will run continuously even if it gets rebooted so
this will boot up just like any other native WD app might so we'll let this
finish processing here and installing and then we'll get back to it and see
how to get everything working so the app is now installed successfully I'm going
to click OK here and this screen will refresh and now on the left hand side
here we should now see that there is a Plex media server installed so even
though we don't have the one from WD installed on
here we do have the one from flex and we can go in and interact with it just like
we would any other app that was installed through the WD app store so
I'm going to click on configure now and that's going to bring us over to the
plex configuration page running on the NAS now remember in order to use the
DVR features right now you need to have a plex pass subscription but all of the
free features will work on here with this installation so you can get a
pretty functional plex server running with all the hardware transcoding here
without the need to get the Plex pass but all the advanced stuff we're going
to be showing here requires that now I did show how to configure the DVR in a
prior video which I'm going to link to down below so I'm going to get this
thing all set up for you and we're going to come back and see how well it
performs so we have the DVR here setup and everything seems to be working just
like it did on my PC so I have the HD homerun prime here that I used to serve
live television to my network I limited the channel guide here to just the HD
channels which is a nice feature to limit down some of the standard
definition stuff so all the HD channels are in place and ready to go one thing
that I would look to just verify on here is the transcoder section go over to
transcoder click on show advanced and just make sure that hardware
acceleration when available is checked on because if you don't have this
checked on this little device won't have enough horsepower to get the transcoding
done but with this box checked it does I found this was enabled by default but
you just want to double-check that before you get into everything so now
we've got a live broadcast here running from my PBS station this is an mpeg-2
broadcast that is being converted via the hardware transcoder on here to h.264
I'm also recording two shows right now at the same time so we've got three
things going on here at once we've got a live broadcast as well as two other
mpeg-2 streams being recorded I really wanted to stress this test out here and
see how this thing can perform doing the sorts of things that you might have
going on in your home and it seems like the my cloud is able to keep up with
that so far I don't usually watch these two shows but they were the only two
mpeg-2 recordings I had going at the moment I want to also want to show you
the CPU utilization here as we're doing those recordings and doing a hardware
transcoding for the live broadcast CPU is at about 42 percent
right now it's hovering around that mark goes anywhere from about 30 to 50
percent depending on what's going on so it is able to keep up with that live
stream going on I've also found that a number of my cable stations are now
being broadcast to me in h.264 and that stresses the transcoder less so I'm
seeing less CPU utilization on those mpeg-4 broadcasts so so far it looks
like it's able to keep up with everything quite well here in the house
and I'm pretty impressed with how all of that is working so far I have noticed
some artifacting on the live broadcast but I am attributing that to my cable
system they really compressed the heck out of stuff and it's certainly visible
on the high resolution screen sitting this close to it I also ran the hardware
transcoder on this using a couple of blu-ray mkv files running at the same
1080p 20 megabit profile this is running at and I did not see the artifacts that
I'm seeing with the live broadcast so I'm going to play my cable company on
that I think if you're pulling things off the air it's going to look better
but nonetheless it is working quite well and one of the things that I like about
the iPad app here is that I can run things picture in pictures I can run off
to other apps and still have my video running on top of it
another thing they added to the iOS applications is the ability now to do
some time shifting so you can see here I've got a big yellow bar here this is
when I started watching I can now pause live TV I can rewind the thing here to
an earlier part of the broadcast I can do 30-second skipping here as well so
that is something that was just recently added to the iOS app it is not yet on
the Android TV app and I don't believe the DVR functionality at the time that
I'm recording this video has yet reached the Android phone and tablet platforms
but I know that they're working on it so we're getting some basic time-shifting
functionality now that was lacking on my first video with this which was nice to
see one thing though that it does not do is a time shift a recording in progress
so if for example I was recording this hour-long show and I started watching
right here at the beginning of the yellow bar that is the extent of the
time shifting I can do even though it's recording right now to the plex media
server I can't rewind to the beginning of the recording until it's done but I
can work within the space that I was in when I first started watching live
little but I'm sure at some point they'll get
the rest of that figured out so all in it seems to be working pretty well over
the Plex DVR here with the WD My cloud I've been impressed with it so far I
did have one crash earlier but I haven't had one since I'm going to
probably keep an eye on this to make sure it is working reliably and I'll do
an update if any further crashes happen now my plan is actually to run both the
Plex DVR and the HD homerun DVR on this box together they can actually work
concurrently which is kind of cool and my plan is to use the HD homerun as the
recording engine as well as the engine that drives all of my in-home television
watching but supplement things with Plex so have Plex organize my media that the
HD homerun records as well as act as a live TV watching functionality for a lot
of my mobile devices like my iPad here so I'm going to be experimenting with
this and sharing all of those experience with experiences with you as time goes
on here but at least at the moment we do have the Plex Media Server running
successfully with its DVR application on this my cloud PR 2100 I'm going to
put a link down below with a list of hardware compatibility for Plex Hardware
transcoding right now I think I might be wrong but at this price point this one
starts at around $400 this is probably the least expensive NAS with Hardware
transcoding that's out there right now you do have to put disks in it so you
know decked out with a four terabyte mirrored configuration you're looking at
about six or $700 not totally inexpensive but I think less expensive
than getting a PC going to do the same tasks so we'll keep playing with this
and see where it goes if you know of other NAS devices that are compatible
definitely leave me some comments down below but at the moment I think this one
is probably the best price to performance ratio I'm seeing at the
moment for Plex Hardware transcoding and that will do it for this one this is Lon
Seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by my patreon
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