Hey everyone,
I recently posted about doing a slight upgrade to my home server.
I have the Plex container running, but I was curious about what resources are recommended to do the transcoding in Plex on the Ubuntu container. The system running an i7 860 with 8gb RAM and Proxmox. I have some 1080p video, i'm not sure about the bitrates on the files, but some are around 4-5gb.
I currently have it limited to 2 cores and 1gb of RAM. Is that enough or should I feed it some more resources?
A general guide would be for a one transcode stream at 1080p you need a passmark score of 2000. Your particular CPU scores approx 5000 so for a high bitrate 1080p stream you want to allocate half the cores to plex.
With that said lots of variables exist. My suggestion would be take the highest bit rate movie you have, play it back on a device and force transcoding (change to a lower quality on the client side) and see if it plays back smooth. Not fool proof but gets you a starting point. Not all codecs are multi threaded so some formats might be cpu core limited. Plex is low on resources except when it comes to CPU. It will bring most CPUs down to its knees. I have a E5-2670 8 core 16 thread and can transcode 6 high bit rate 1080p streams bfore it runs out of steam but will only consume around 2gb of ram. I can only transcode one high bit rate 4k stream and one 1080p stream.
I have Plex running on a J1800 machine which is a dual-core @ 2.41 GHz. It is also a 10TDP part so it isn't very powerful. On this machine I am able to stream up to 4K on my local network but that is without any transcoding, I can trasncode on this machine but only got it working with low-ish bitrate 720p video.
So it seems like as long as I keep everything at original and avoid transcoding I should be fine. Clients and the server will be local anyway so it shouldn't be a problem. I will probably give it 1.5gb of RAM though, it seems to be maxing out the 1gb right now. Just want to keep it efficient.
Pretty much, transcoding hit this machine very hard and it can't keep up but watching the original video is fine most the time, at least as long as the network speed can handle it.
I wanted to get one of those machines about a year ago after seeing a Wendell review on it. I will look at something similar when I upgrade. Hopefully the added cores/threads may make Zen a nice home server part.
Zen should work very well for a home server. My current J1800 server is running apache, nginx, gitlab, mysql server, mongodb, plex and all sorts of other stuff and its only a low power dual-core and it handles this workload fairly well, I'd prefer something more powerful, even if it is only the 4 core 8 thread part. If they are cheap I might get one for my server or get the Ryzen 8 core and use my 4690k for the server.
Plex server as a whole requires VERY little, aslong as you abide by the codexes of the day.
A raspberry pi can plex server like a mofo, right up until you wanna do non cilicon standards like H.265.
If you can settle on H.264 anything will do really, most GPUs existing today supports compressions, and transcoding H.264.
So if you just wanna webpage that media content, id say get a raspberry pi, if you wanna go H.265. get a massive xeon server, since decoding is handled ny software more or less.
My point is dependant on your use case if you can settle on h.264 you can pretty much settle on any hardware, and if i were you id go for low power consumption options, but if you wanna go all gung ho and do H.265 id use a x86 pc with some of the newest hardware available.
My advice is that storage is cheaper then computational power, so get the larger harddrive, and a low power pc of sorts, and just enjoy some H.264. you wont know the difference on a local network anyways.
I can recommend Emby. Tbh, I started not like Plex after a couple of years. Emby has support for GPU assisted transcoding, live channels, better Kodi integration and much newer versionss of ffmpeg. CPU usage is siimlar or lower for Emby, but If you have the know-how(and the supported HW) you can passthrough the GPU to the VM and get Emby to use that.
This looks interesting, it might be worth moving to at some point. I think I will keep trying Plex as it is already set up and working, but if I do have problems then switching may be an option. I have an Nvidia GT 210 hooked up right now (no integrated video), but I have a Radeon HD 7770 sitting in a box I could use for the GPU rendering. The i7 860 does support VT-D, so passing through a GPU may be an option, but will require some more manual configuration.