How many transcodes in uncompressed 4K/HDR/Atmos (HEVC?) would be realistic simultaneously if having this this setup? No HW acceleration.
Like this:
OS: Linux (headless)
MOBO: Some of the better (enough VRMs) mITX for Intel gen 15
CPU: Intel i9 Gen 15 (lets make realistic assumption of performance… or lets say 10 % better than gen 14, that runs cooler and without hyperthreading - possibly delided and with slight boost)
RAM:Kingston Fury Beast Black DDR5 6000MHz 2x16GB
PSU: Seasonic Fanless Platinum
SSD: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB
ROUTER: Asus RT-AX88U Pro
ISP: 1000/1000 mbit
Is it beafy enough? For a few or many users at the same time!?
A speculative scenario, there are are 8 users streaming different type of content. Three of them stream FLAC and five uncompressed 4K. One is having a 200 inch cinema projector in Sweden. The server is in Sweden too… Another person is in the war Ukraine, having poor connection on a train using her tablet and phone. Her daughter is in Bali with her friends, and using mobile data with a portable speaker, and dance with her friends. In the evening she go to hotel room, watching a movie in bed with her boyfriend. The last person is all day looking TV shows at his 55" OLED TV in norway. One of these people who listen to FLAC does have a much cheaper vintage stereo and ADSL. One of those people consider himself as a diehard audiofile + an cinefile. The other is a serious cinefile. Others don’t care and somebody just appreciate or notice the extra details, no matter having old or new tech. It’s hypothetical but similar scenarios are somewhat realistic. Maybe not at once, but who knows. GPU transcoding decease quality, I am a perfectionist. And I guess there situations where it makes difference. If it was useless to deactivate, I guess that switch wouldn’t be implemented at all.
Do you think someone watching on a 6" phone, 12" tablet or a cheap hotel TV can tell the difference between GPU & CPU transcoded video? They will probably be getting 10 Mbps, 1080p at best.
If you’re that worried about it, keep 1080p BD rips in addition to the 4K media. You won’t have to worry about tone mapping and that CPU can probably handle ~20 1080p transcodes.
Did you read it all? I meant some could be like that, yes. Some use cases can be “low end” or old-tech. Also, some cases can be placebo. When it comes to Hi-Fi the whole community is crazy about fancy cables for instance. You really think there is a real world difference? I think it doesn’t matter, as long as you PERCEIVE difference. So, my point is that is many reasons and various situations.
Did you read about the 200" cinema screen? 200" cinema screen with a high end projector + with ATOMOS on long distance + load on servers absolutely do difference. Right? Myself, I consider streaming FLAC with my Audeze LCD-2 Classic headphones on carribean cruise or at my gf’s villa in Odessa. Just examples, these are real examples thought.
But I shouldn’t be but hurt. I forgot about looking for passmarks. You are right! That’s a fact… I thinking if the delid, have a really good cooling paste (getting down temp 10-15 degrees) and putting some decent water cooling. Then some overclocking, without making the server unstable or running too hot? But could I even push get it one more stream?
Hmm that would be up to 4 simultaneous streams then? That could be enough, if there are maximum 8-15 users. Then not everybody would watch at the same time. If activating, “hardware transcoding” it only kicks in when it’s needed? Or it kicks in no matter what?
For streaming audio (with no video) your cpu will be fine for lots and lots of streams. You could even set PlexAmp to not transcode if you wanted full quality FLAC. Audio is easy stuff to a modern CPU.
Video transcoding, on the other hand, needs a lot of power if you’re doing 4K. You can, however, adjust the quality of the transcode if you want to keep things as close as possible to the original. Quick sync is really the best way to handle all of the video transcoding.
If you’re streaming to a 200” projector then you probably want to disable transcoding for that client so you’re getting the absolute best video possible (assuming available bandwidth).
Thanks for good information! So, having i9 15900k until christmas or next year, could possibly give me 3-4 simultaneous streams before a possible GPU (like older/cheaper quadro) kicks in? I did read (rumours) about serious changes in 15:th gen Desktop CPUs. Such as DDR5, new socket and removal of Hyperthreading. Removal of Hyperthreading should have strong benefit on some applications. Big gain in IPC, like 19 % or so… according to comment at Reddit. But, obviously less good for other applications. What does that mean for PLEX? Also take in mind 5-10 % possible boost and slightly increased efficiency. Lets assume rumours can be true. I think current benchmarks on prototypes points to 5-10 %. If I recall correctly…
Don’t even bother with an old quadro, just get the CPU with the integrated GPU. The iGPU on an i9 Gen 14 or 15 will handle more media formats including AV1, than an old quadro which will be based on either Pascal or Turing architecture.
It will also generally handle more streams, use less power, and be less cost.
