If I wanted to support 3-4 simultaneous 720p transcoding, I am wondering what should my hardware look like. I am comfortable with getting the CPU, motherboard, RAM and putting it all together if the pre-assembled price from the manufacturer is too much. I have plex pass so can also use hardware acceleration feature. The device won’t do much other than be a plex server. I see the FAQ’s with passmark score and such but seems like it’s a lot of research and hoping to avoid if someone already has such a setup running.
Any ideas?
From documentation - (doesn’t talk about what may be needed for 3 720p transcodes)
Single 720p transcode: Intel Core i3 3.0 GHz
Single 1080p transcode: Intel Core i5 3.0GHz
Single 4K transcode: Intel Core i7 3.2GHz
If you’ll need to support more than one simultaneous transcode, you’ll need a more powerful processor.
If you’re using anything with a Kaby Lake or higher don’t even worry about the benchmark numbers.
I got bored of testing when I hit 10 x1080p transcodes at about 10% CPU.
That was with i7 6770.
Sadly the documentation doesn’t really take into account HW acceleration.
You probably don’t even need the Kaby Lake, but still good to have in case you ever venture into h265/x265 in the future.
I am certain that even something like an i3 8100 will be able to support 3-4 720p transcodes without breaking a sweat (with hardware transcoding enabled). That plus motherboard and ram will be less than 300€ for a quite decent setup.
And when looking at older (used) hardware, keep in mind that you will need a Skylake CPU or newer if you want to be able to hardware transcode HEVC/x265, as @Xhaka already hinted at.
hmm… thats interesting. Admittedly, I have been running plex for a few years on a Intel Mobile Celeron Dual-Core 1017U (1.60GHz 2MB) using mostly directly play its been fine running 1-2 streams. The documentation makes it seem like I need a supercomputer to support 3-4 transcoding.
Plex really need to update the docs.
HW acceleration really is awesome.
For me in the 6-7 years of using Plex it is by a long, long way the biggest thing they implemented.
i3,5 or 7 doesn’t really matter.
The graphics chip on that CPU is far more important.
An i3 or an i7 with the same chip is essentially the same thing with HW acceleration.
Pretty much anything Skylake will be fine for your needs.
Kaby Lake onwards will give you a degree of future proofing. (though unless you feel you will need to venture into the smaller file sizes of x265/h265 is probably overkill)
