I’ve started to run into the problem of the few family members I have on my server wanting to watch the 4k content I have. I don’t plan on getting anything in standard HD if at all possible. I’m running an i5-4440 16gb of ram in windows 7. Hevc hardware transcoding doesn’t work with this CPU and I would rather upgrade this machine with a p2000 or to a better system that can handle 2-4 10bit 4k remuxes. None of my family has a 4k device or the internet speeds to get a 4k video so all transcodes would be 1080 or 720. I don’t want to create a 2nd library or have duplicate copies of movies as that takes up space and time, unless there is a way for plex to re-encode only 4k movies with no intervention from me. My question is this. Given my current setup, would it be more cost effective to spend $400 on a quadro or get a dual xeon 5670 rig and run plex from that?
uhm well only you can answer that… how much can you get a dual xeon 5670 rig for? if it is more than 400, then it sounds like p2000 is a better deal.
Realistically money isn’t really the issue. None of the solutions that I think will work for me are bank breaking propositions. I sort of just want some feedback from someone who has also looked into or has already done what I am trying to do and can give some caveats that I might be missing. I don’t really want to choose one over the other only to find out that XYZ problem will prevent it from working how I expect it to. Does that make sense?
I have been wanting a p2000 myself but I just loaded a fresh install of Debian on an old dell r610 blade and was able to 2 simultaneous 4khdr transcodes to 1080 with no drops or lag.
Really there are 2 concerns
Nvidia currently doesn’t decode in Linux, cpu will do it so you still need a sufficiently beefy cpu, for now.
Plex doesn’t do hdr to sdr conversions so if your plan is to stream converted 4khdr the colors can be jacked up
I’m not too worried about decoding in linux as I use windows. From what I can tell the picture quality isn’t too incredibly bad. What are the specs of your r610 if I might ask. Also with 2 transcodes going do you have any overhead for a direct play?
dual quad core xeon x5570 @ 2.93ghz, 8 cores/16 hyperthreaded
64gig ram
perc6 raid controller
it’s original life was vmware virtualization server
I tried windows server on it awhile back with plex and I didn’t get it working the way I wanted, and if I recall it didn’t seem to handle 4k transcoding as well either.
So either debian helped a lot, or plex performance has improved since then.
I’d like to stick a p2k in it, but there are some obstacles in the way, like it only has x8 pcie slots, and not sure if there is room for the fan on it either.
Then there is power consumption, if I did have a p2k I could stick it in a smaller more power efficient box and save a bunch of electricity.
But if I built a smaller box for plex, I would just go with a newer intel cpu and not bother with a p2k in the first place.
so that is my dilemma.
here is 2 simultaneous 4khdr transcodes going on this test server
unfortunately for me, I seem to be running into a hardware issue under that load and get reboots. I need to investigate and figure out if bad cpu or ram or something else.
Operating system Debian Linux 9
Webmin version 1.900 Authentic theme version 19.21
Time on system Saturday, December 1, 2018 6:45 PM Kernel and CPU Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 on x86_64
Processor information Intel® Xeon® CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz, 16 cores System uptime 3 minutes
Running processes 279 CPU load averages 0.25 (1 min) 0.31 (5 mins) 0.14 (15 mins)
Real memory 691.96 MB used / 61.44 GB total Virtual memory 0 bytes used / 62.49 GB total
Local disk space
Thanks for this thread - kind of made up my mind on some things. There’s a local non-profit liquidating their assets and they’re selling r610s for $50 or so.
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