Up is the one you’re going to want to focus on. I know you have 40Mbps upload, but always always always cut off 30% of that for possible overhead. So you should think of it more like 25-27Mbit upload.
Now, if you remotely stream to 5 people, they’ll be limited to 5Mbit streams each. For reference a BluRay is approximately 40Mbit, and Netflix is approximately 8Mbit at 1080p. You could potentially get better quality by going x265 for all of your releases, and making yourself a standard 4Mbit for 1080p content. That would look roughly equivalent to an 8Mbit x264 file, so it would be as good of quality as Netflix is. But, if your friends have devices that don’t support x265, you’ll be transcoding back into x264, and that conversion is a bit more difficult than a straight x264 transcode.
Device I know of that absolutely don’t support x265:
Web Browsers
PlayStations
Some older Streaming Devices (old generations of Roku, FireTV Sticks, ChromeCast, etc)
Hmm, I know that my ISP offers some pro service that uses fiber, which I plan on getting at some point down the line. That setup gives 1 Gbps up and down. I guess in the meantime I can just force 720p and not have to worry about using x265, right? Not sure how the transcoding process actually works, though so I might be wrong on that. Am I even able to force 720p transcoding on files or is that on the client side to set?
Client side dictates the bitrate, thankfully (in your case thankfully, I personally hate this fact) the clients default is 720p @ 4Mbit I believe, so if you don’t tell them to change it, that’s the quality that they’ll see all the time. To be honest though, the goal of ANY server administrator should be to reduce the number of transcodes, and actively build your library based on your limitations and what you’re trying to accomplish. If you rely on Plex to do it, it will do it, but it’s just another thing that can go wrong, and will create an additional pain point. People who transcode more, have more problems, and come to this forum with complaints about things not working more often.
No worries man, welcome to Plex, it’s fun, and try not to get discouraged, there’s a lot of people here who will help out, so don’t be afraid to make a post and ask questions
I’m using an AMD Radeon R9 380 - it seems to be working fine busting HEVC Main 10s into something watchable (quite good on the FireTV - Call Ripley) with neither CPU or GPU creeping much past 10%.
Just spent a lot of time before finding out that it seem my setup isn’t supported for hardware transcode, even though i have a dedicated GPU, and enough CPU power to do it.
The server is
CPU: AMD Epyc 7401p
GPU: Nvidia P400
OS: Linux (Debian)
I’ve got official Nvidia drivers and plex installed. I’ve tried with GPU passthrough to VM, to container and directly on bare metal. All Nvidia tools work in all instances.
Then I found the page with requirements, but I didn’t actually realize that you couldn’t use hardware transcode with the GPU unless you also had an Intel CPU in the system.
Is this something that will be possible at some time? I don’t really see buying an Intel CPU in the foreseeable future. I’m drawing plenty of power on the Epyc CPU as it is without adding extra CPU’s to the mix.
SInce AMD make the fastest CPUs and the most cost effective CPUs, isn’t it about time Plex got fully up to date and started supporting the best architecture? Zen3 launches next month and Intel is even further behind. The graphics offerings from AMD are also top notch.
It seems utterly backward to me that there is a flat refusal to support AMD products - it has all the hallmarks of Intel paying Plex to keep the AMD out, paying Plex in otherwards to force slower more expensive hardware from Intel onto the Plex user base.
This is wholly unsatisfactory and throws back to the old days when Intel throws its cash around to restrict user choice.
My guess is there is some Intel cash flying around here to keep AMD out.
I actually started looking at Emby instead of Plex if this doesn’t change anytime soon.
Zen3 architecture launches next month and AMD is already bruising Intel in the performance stakes, once Zen3 launches its a no-brainer AMD will be the fastest by even more miles.
The answer “No we don’t support AMD” simply isn’t good enough.
Hi mcgrog, Thank you for this post! I am more or less mirroring your build!
I got a screaming deal on a gen10 with the same x3421 I have a p620 laying around and some 3tb green drives still kicking. I was wondering can you post a more in-depth run down of your build, what you did for cables / cards / drives? I’m struggling with if I can jam a dedicated raid card in there and use nicer SAS drives I have kicking around.
Is the wx4100 longer than the PCIe slot so just running in 8x mode?
Still no AMD Hardware transcoding support on Linux?.. Given that Plex is using already ffmpeg for transcoding (which supports AMD HW transcoding), what is holding back this feature?
Only support Intel CPUs (slow and expensive) and not supporting AMD graphics or CPUs (absurd).
So just to make it clear: I am never going to buy an Intel CPU, Intel are a wretched company who play dirty tricks their whole lives. Just as bad as it was 25 years ago when I worked for Cyrix.
I was just shopping around for a new AMD apu (G-processor) based server. Very sad to see that I won’t be able to use it as my Plex server due to this silly limitation.
Just to double-check, does AMD APU work on Windows Server? Linux?
