I’ve been using Plex for a while with a couple of stand-alone PC’s running OpenSUSE without any real issues. I’ve started collecting some higher resolution media that I want to store on Plex and make available to various devices, but the need to transcode down to lower resolutions is crushing the CPU on one of my servers. It’s a tri-core AMD machine (8450) that works just great in terms of serving up content but it can’t handle a heavy transcode operation.
I’ve always done this with old hardware lying around (except for my main Plex server - this is a secondary at another location) and things have been great. But, it appears that I have to modernize this one a bit now as well.
The machines I’ve been using are all HP desktop towers and can easily handle three physical hard drives plus at least one DVD drive. Most of the towers I’ve come across support only two hard drives without having to have adapters and drive sleds and such. Does anyone have any recommendations for a specific desktop tower that would give me the hardware specs I need along with the ability to put three hard drives into it easily?
Money is a factor, so cheaper is better. And, since I have zero interest in all of the “extra” stuff you get with new machines, I’m not really interested in buying a new PC (especially since I don’t use Windows).
Are there instructions on how to use this forum software? I don’t see anything different in the post except that I may have had the “server-linux” tag which isn’t there. My posts are apparently not going to where I think they are when I create them.
Depending on the category, you may need to add an additional qualifying tag.
Select it from the drop down list. You can also start typing and it will auto-fill for you
For minimal cost you can turn your existing tower into a NAS with FreeNAS and buy a NUC7PJYH as a dedicated PMS box for roughly $300. It has the latest generation QSV that will transcode HEVC HDR10 and older codecs in HW.
Unless you have a workstation class machine, the chances of your tower supporting ECC RAM is almost zero. And, without, ECC RAM, the FreeNAS community will basically laugh you off of the forums if you need help. I’ve been down this road, and couldn’t hate the product more. It is abhorrently difficult to set up, use, manage, and maintain. While I get that the product is essentially enterprise-class quality of software, there’s simply no reason to be running that sort of stuff in the home - it’s way overkill.
So, in order to convert to a FreeNAS device, I would first have to have a workstation class machine (which would eliminate the need for this post in the first place) and then I would have to shell out a good chunk of money for ECC RAM. In the end, that isn’t a “minimal cost” solution.
Further, I don’t want a NAS device. I want a Plex server. And, not Plex on a NAS, either. Even if I turned this into a NAS and ran Plex on it (or not, doesn’t really matter), the hardware isn’t going to get any more “powerful” as a result. The hardware currently can’t keep up with transcodes when trying to shift 4K material to 1080 or even when watching content from one of the TV Channel plugins (it has to download and transcode, and everything is horribly out of sync).
Thanks. This is basically what I’ve done except that I navigate my way INTO an area before attempting to add a new topic. And yet, it seems that they’re going to the wrong place.
I’m sure that there’s a lot of usefulness in how this software works, but I’m making a lot of mistakes with it. Oh well.
You took this discussion straight into the deep end. My point really was to tell you to turn your existing tower into a file share server using your choice of file sharing protocol. Use OpenSUSE if you wish. Get a NUC7PJYH, install a Plex supported Linux distro, mount the NFS/SMB share and then install PMS. It will transcode the latest HEVC content in HW for you using QSV. Here is a YT video made months ago that showcased its ability to be a cheap but effective PMS box.
I want an all-in-one solution. And it needs to transcode for ALL devices, not just the NUC (or whatever). Minimal footpring, one network connection, one power plug, etc.
I’m not trying to create a solution that holds media for me to play only on one TV - I’m trying to build a legitimate server that does all of the functions in one place, just like my primary machine.
I found an HP Envy machine that’s a quad-core AMD with a graphics card. Not sure if the graphics card will be able to be leveraged for the transcoding or not, but the additional CPU and RAM that is has over this machine should make it do what I need. Plus, it can hold three hard drives internally like I need it to.
Uh…nowhere did I suggest it as a client machine for playback. I specifically said to install PMS on it to handle transcoding as a server. Not sure how you interpretated that into client playback. Again rewatch the YT video links and specifically the first one.
Paraphrasing here but you are asking for recommendations to transcode all content up to HEVC for less capable devices. This solution needed to be small, cheap and simple. A NUC7PJYH fits that bill. It also allows you to leverage your current tower as the machine that will store your media and the NUC to DP/DS/transcode your media as needed.
