Plex noob looking for advice

Hey guys, I’ve never used Plex before but am looking to set up a server this week for me and my family as streaming bills are getting out of control. I have a small library of legally acquired media that will work as a good test before I go sailing for the rest.

I have a Thinkserver TD340 desktop with dual xeons and space for many hard drives that I was going to use simply due to its HDD capacity

(12c24t combined and 64gb RAM)

However they’re sandy bridge Xeon’s and not very power efficient. However I can put a Quadro P2000 GPU in it for hardware accelerated transcoding

The other idea I have is I have access to an HP SFF PC with an i5 8400T and a few external hard drive mounts I could plug into power in the wall and USB to the PC

This is smaller and saves power but forgoes GPU acceleration leaving me with only Intel UHD 630 graphics. It’s also only 6 cores/threads but they are much faster.

I also want whichever system I use to run pi-hole for DNS level ad blocking. But that’s very light and shouldn’t be an issue to run at the same time.

Am I overthinking this? I have access to both systems. Which would be best. At most maybe 3 people would be accessing it at once. Across iPhones, smart TVs etc

jws_shadotak,

In terms of transcoding streams, the i5 8400T would win, hands down. The integrated GPU on the 8th Gen and higher Intel chips can do several 4K streams (like, 8+ or something crazy) simultaneously. The iGPU is just a beast. Be sure to enable hardware transcoding in the Plex server settings to use it properly. Look at Intel QuickSync for more info on that. Edit: I think this requires Plex Pass

That being said, if you’re streaming media to a modern device, you should be able to direct play everything and won’t need transcoding. I find transcoding is only necessary when people I’ve shared with are trying to stream and my bandwidth is too shitty to handle the full bitrate.

I see several options here:

  • Thinkserver only, direct streaming stuff or minimal transcoding
  • Thinkserver as NAS, SFFPC as Plex transcoder
  • SFFPC as server, not as much storage
Anomalous_Llama,

Alright so I was definitely overthinking it. I’m gonna set it up tonight on the SFF PC.

I can get several terabytes of storage on it. If I end up making heavy use of this I can migrate the library to a NAS using the Thinkserver afterwards

Thanks!

jws_shadotak,

I used to run everything on a 4 TB and found it filled up really fast. 10-14 GB for a good quality 1080p movie, 3 GB per episode for the good shows, etc. It all added up really fast and I’d have to clean out old stuff pretty frequently.

I ended up buying a refurbished 14 TB HDD and it’s been smooth sailing since then. I think I’m a little more than halfway through it right now.

bluespin,

Worth noting that certain clients such as the PS4 and PS5 apps have terrible format support and will result in transcoding if you’re storing, say, MKVs. Something to look out for, but everyone else in this thread is on the money: don’t worry too much about performance at this stage. That’s a bridge you cross if and when you reach it

RotaryKeyboard,
@RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Hardware transcoding of any kind does require a Plex pass.

akilou,

You’re over thinking it. Prioritize hard drive space over processing power.

kae,

For the needs you described, you want to go with power efficiency. Check to make sure your quicksync version can handle h265, and you’ll be fine

Anomalous_Llama,

Seems from some rudimentary googling here that I may have drastically overestimated the hardware requirements for 2 or 3 4k streams. Seems the UHD 630 may be the move so I can save on power

Blxter,
@Blxter@lemmy.zip avatar

I run my server off an old college laptop. You can set up Plex to only allow direct streams to remote devices witch I force so there is no hw transcoding of video only problem with it so far is old Roku devices can’t play hevc files. I’m by no means an expert but I see no problem running Plex on something low power. Again I’m by no means an expert though.

Anomalous_Llama,

I’m a PC gaming enthusiast and work in IT support so I’m very comfortable working on PC’s etc but just have never gotten into media encoding/decoding so I really am unfamiliar with the capabilities of UHD 630 and if it can handle the load

Using the external HDD mounts I could give it several terabytes of storage (though many more on the TD340 of course)

Faceman2K23,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

The uhd 630 is pretty good but it is old enough that it might have some codec limitations. I think it was the first generation with full H265 10bit support so your 4k hdr rips can be transcoded if need be.

You should be able to manage 4 or 5 simultaneous 4k to 1080 transcode and at least 10 (likely more depending on bitrates) 1080p transcode streams.

It is still best practice to avoid transcoding wherever possible, but if it is needed it should be quick and seamless on that chip.

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