Is it possible to offload transcoding to a secondary Plex server?

General Discussions
1

Hi there.

I have my Plex server on my NAS which is not powerful enough for Plex transcoding. But I was wondering if there’s anyway that I could have that main Plex server offload the transcoding to a secondary Plex server running on a different PC with more than capable hardware for transcoding. Both the NAS and the PC are on the same network fully wired.

The only solution I see for this is to maintain 2 individual Plex servers both with it’s own libraries (even if they feed from the exact same storage devices) and use the Plex server accordingly. The downside is that I’d have to maintain 2 Plex servers which I wanted to avoid if at all possible.

Thoughts?

2

You cannot share transcoding duties between servers and one server cannot tell another to “transcode this file.” But there is no reason why you can’t run two or more servers that look at the same files. That cannot share anything else like watched status etc but a Plex server does not care if another server sees its files.

3

The only “reason” is keeping 2 servers updated and configured, which might not as much of a pain as I’m thinking. Time will tell.

4

Why don’t you just run the Plex server on the more powerful server and just use the NAS as file storage?

5

@broyuken said:
Why don’t you just run the Plex server on the more powerful server and just use the NAS as file storage?

Because the NAS is up 24/7 and the PC isn’t.

6

I tend to keep ‘The Server’ and the box with storage in it up 24/7 'cause one isn’t really any good without the other. I do know that NAS (among other things) stands for ‘Not a Server’ hence the separation of the tasks they’re to perform. Technically my storage box isn’t really a NAS. It’s just the old server I’m shoving HDDs into so in a pinch it can and does do some work when necessary.

Of course, you could use the PC to create Direct Play material the NAS can happily deliver. May take a while, but eventually you could turn off the PC when it’s not doing anything.

7

If the pc isn’t on all the time, then how would you be able to offload transcoding to it?

You might be able to run Plex on it, and set up a wake on LAN thing to turn it on when you want to access something on it.