With the fan it always reports a pretty cool temp. The main thing that helped me run the most stuff off of Emby Server on the Pi without buffering was installing the biggest fan that the Pi can run as well as heat sinks with real heat sink transfer tape.
I've been running emby off of a Pi3b or 3b+ now for over a year and use it daily. I converted my own DVDs at H264 and they play fine, CDs Home movies, MKVs from Blu-Ray rips.
I used a manual install of the latest version of Emby beta rather than the version that Dietpi will install. I also moved the dietpi startup to the external drive (instead of the SD card) because it's a lot smoother when run off of a drive in my experience. RPI 3b+, DietPi, several terabyte drives. Just for reference, I've been using a setup similar to JaScoMa above. I hope this helps and if you have any other questions, feel free to respond. In looking at testing and reviews, I'm leaning toward the RockPro64 and sticking with DietPI as it's OS. One is the RockPro64 and the other is the Odroid XU4. So, I began looking at other PI type servers which could handle H.265 and two came up.
In testing, I attempted a movie recently for H.265 and like the MKV, the PI would not play the movie without constant buffering. When I encode, I configure them for H.264 and constant quality set to 20, and for audio, I go ahead and tell it to auto-pass-through the DTS HD 7.1 as well as add an AAC (avcodec) channel configured for 192k. In testing on my PI3bP, you can't play a RAW MKV file on Emby plays for about 1-2 seconds, then buffer for 5-10, play, buffer, etc.Īlso, if you pre-encode your movies, which I do (using Handbrake and H.264), it'll work fine. I used this as a guide to setup and configure DietPI and Emby.
I haven't had any issue upgrading Emby to the latest version after installing this package. The other nice thing about this is that during the software installation portion, it has Emby listed as a package and will install Emby 3.5.2.0 for you and configure it to work properly (creates the Emby user/group, etc). I run DietPI as the OS it's a stripped down version of Debian for PI. I current run an Emby server on a Raspberry PI 3b Plus, with a 32GB Class 10 SD, a Seagate 5tb Personal Cloud NAS, and use Xbox One and Roku as clients.
There's are others which offer USB-3, 4GB of RAM as well as eMMC I'll cover them later. Sadly, the Raspberry PI 3b Plus is the slowest PI available out on the market currently.