Do I need a powerful pc for a plex server? I have an old pc im planning to turn into a plex server. Is it the pc that transcodes the movies or plex servers do?
Do I need a powerful pc for a plex server? I have an old pc im planning to turn into a plex server.
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If the device you're watching on is a dumb "smart" TV, the server will likely need to transcode your content, as crappy TVs have underpowered chipsets without support for modern codecs.
For that, you'll need a powerful pc for the plex server.
If it's a PC where the videos can be played natively, the server barely needs more resources than if it was Samba share or something.
Also, old PCs as servers is a meme, they consume too much power, they are inefficient.
thanks, theres my plan out the window then lol
dude
is a fucking retard. Power consumption is not that big of a deal if you just 'want a server' and are smart enough to figure out how to turn an old PC into one.
The "YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE THE NEWEST TECH" crowd is seriously fucking annoying. Put your old hardware to use.
for example:
>i loaded an extrememly light distro on a thinkpad T40 with 512mb ram and a pentium (m) and it works great for browsing the web in bed, and word processing.
that anon mentioned about smart tvs being too underpowered to transcode? I am planning on streaming to a smart tv, will that have any effect?
It really depends what kind of CPU the old PC has. Plex themselves recommend a CPU with a PassMark score of at least 2000 for a single 1080p stream ( https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/ ). I have an i5 3570k that can handle a single 1080p stream just fine.
Also have Plex server with the same processor. Works fine. Only times I notice is if I'm trying to do something on the server and there are 2 people connected in transcoding.
first of all dont use plex. get the cheapest video card you can find that has avc hardware encode (basically anything made in the last decade), and jellyfin will use this for its encoding
>Do I need a powerful pc for a plex server?
No, if you're careful with the content to avoid the need for transcoding.
>Is it the pc that transcodes the movies or plex servers do?
Transcoding is done on the server, so if you use an old, less powerful machine, you will want to avoid transcoding by checking what the native formats are that the device you want to watch on supports.
Ignore this entire post.
>I convert all my media to 8bit h264 with aac which can be played by just about anything
This. If your content is all 8-bit H.264 (main profile) with AAC audio, it will virtually never need to be transcoded at all in the first place, as these formats are natively supported by all modern browsers and "smart" TV's.
>wait so my hardware is not what does the transcoding but plex itself?
>it uses the cpu instead of the asics on the gpu, which is very inefficient
>So if I’m gaming and someone is watching plex on a smart rv using my server, will that slow my gaming down?
It depends on a few things. If you can avoid transcoding in the first place, none of this is an issue. That means using the right format for the media, and making sure that the Plex client(s) are set to stream the content at the maximum (original) quality in their settings. You can also disable transcoding entirely on the Plex server, so that it cannot accidentally happen.
That said, Plex will use the GPU for transcoding automatically as long as it's an nVidia GPU with the correct drivers installed. (It is possible to make Plex do this with AMD GPU's too, but that needs to be set up manually).
In short, if you use the right formats for the media, and the right settings on the Plex client(s), there is no reason you can't use a fairly old and reasonably low-powered machine as a Plex server.
I try to watch x265 movies on a plex app on my lg tv, I notice it can’t handle transcoding 4K movies and it struggles if the file size is over 5 gb
Just get a Disney+ subscription bro
I convert all my media to 8bit h264 with aac which can be played by just about anything (using jellyfin).
wait until you realize there's no good media storage for large amounts of data, and that its a pointless, expensive and quite dangerous hobby(housefires), on top of this you have to resort to using plex unless you feel like setting up your own server with jellyfin and configuring it all.
I'm in a similar position. There are no good resources regarding the requirements for a NAS and home media server. I'm gonna use jellyfin though due to hating proprietary software
not at all, and unless you pay for plex it doesn't let you hw transcode either.
for jellyfin you'll want any intel or amd cpu with igpu, something like a 6w dual core jasper lake would be completely fine
That's an information I have been missing. Thanks anon!
wait so my hardware is not what does the transcoding but plex itself?
it uses the cpu instead of the asics on the gpu, which is very inefficient
So if I’m gaming and someone is watching plex on a smart rv using my server, will that slow my gaming down?
where do you get all these information about low watt cpus?
ill be using a 30w~ cpu (amd athlon 200ge) with a chink made 250W psu model name ""700W""
Why do people need transcoding so much. Even my 2 year old phone plays 4K HEVC video without needing any transcoding
>have an old pc
how old ?
My 12 years old i7 860 handles realtime transcodes fine.
Use Jellyfin though.
probably like 7 yo
The server does
Get a modern Intel CPU with QuickSync, even a low end CPU can easily handle transcoding with hardware acceleration and the quality is excellent. Wikipedia has a nice table of format support by generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
I use plex on an old optiplex with an i3-4160 it works fine.
Not really, I used a 13 year old build as my Plex server until recently. It did struggle with certain transcoding tasks, but generally worked great. Now that I have a modern 12600k build, loading is a bit faster.
why do people recommend jellyfin? i tried it out a few months ago and found its library automation and plugin ecosystem to be laughable compared to plex.
i get that people here prefer FOSS, but jesus christ, shouldn't that FOSS have feature parity with proprietary solutions?
for me sometimes plex works better and sometimes jellyfin, i could probably get rid of plex entirely if swiftfin on apple tv was further along
its literally fine, dont listen to anyone else saying old pc’s are a meme for servers. been running plex among other locally hosted services on an old pentium laptop with 2 cores and 2gb ram, has not failed me yet. it just werks anon
As long as you don't have to do any transcoding then no. I had one running on a Raspberry pi 4 for almost a year before it went tits up because Ubuntu for pi is absolute shit. Now I got it running on my Nvidia shield and that works too.
Anons here saying you need a good PC for transcoding are fucking retarded
An i3-8100 will transcode 3-4 4k files AT ONCE with room for Radarr Sonarr Prowlarr Mullvad and qBittorrent. Transcode to RAM.
Tldr Buy shitty optiplex with any 7th gen Intel on eBay or something
You can let plex transcode full hd H.265 on CPU on a 9th gen intel to H.264. Never tried 4K.
An alternative is that if you have an i915 videochipset, say an intel NUC for instance, you can setup jellyfin on it and have a fairly low power device with hardware encoding. That way you don't have to spend any money on hardware transcoding with plex.
if you've got an old videocard lying around, say GTX9XX series, or something similar you can do hardware transcoding as well, in which case the CPU barely matters anymore.
It really depends on what you'll be doing.
Why do you need this? Why can't you just transfer the movies to an external SSD and plug it into your TV?
Share my server with friends and family
I have an old i7 7700k for my plex server. It transcodes for everyone at 1080p. So far the most has been 5-6 people without an issue, not sure how many more it can handle, but I suspect my upload speed would be an issue before the pc. I've never seen it go over 20% cpu utilization.
all these movies were ripped from your physical media collection and obtained legally I assume
Don’t transcode on the fly. Either optimize the file ahead of time and stream directly or just stream the big file if your network can handle it.
Shouldn’t be an issue over LAN, but if you want to stream over WAN it is best to go ahead and optimize the file.
Do you really want the GPU to be doing the same work over and over, or just do the work once?