I have an old 2012 Mac mini that has been my trusty Plex server since 2012. I am eyeing upgrading and eventually converting my library to all 4k content. I dont do a massive amount of remote library sharing, but enough that I think its time for getting something beefier to run my server.
There are a lot of articles and recommendations for what you need to be able to run X number of streams etc. But I am wondering a little about hypothetical extremes of a server with the PMS software. I obviously cannot afford a $25k Mac Pro… but even if I could wouldn’t there be diminishing returns on some of those higher CTO options? A few things I was wondering:
Can PMS even make use of 28 cores on a Xeon? Would there be a meaningful transcoding difference?
Does PMS use the graphics cards for any of the processing? Can it make use of paired graphics processors?
I don’t have a 28-core Xeon myself… from what I’ve been reading, Plex will use a number of cores when it comes to transcoding. The transcoding won’t be distributed evenly but different jobs will be assigned to individual cores (e.g. video transcoding, audio transcoding…). Hence the CPU requirements support article lists the passmark score of the CPU as a benchmark as that will aim at the performance of a single core.
TL;DR: multiple parallel transcodes will get your 28 cores occupied… raising the question if you’ll actually have that many concurrent transcodes.
Plex is capable to use the GPU for hw-accelerated transcoding. Apparently there’s an OS limitation that’ll only allow a single hw-accelerated transcode at a time.
Ok thats interesting. And if its doing all of the transcoding on the CPU then I guess if you were picking where to spend your money you’d do it on the beefiest CPU and not worrying about the vide cards?
This information now means I really only need to come up with 10k for a Mac Pro…
I wonder if the videoToolbox concurrency limitation is still present. There are reports of many simultaneous transcodes on M1-based Macs.
I’m typing this on a Mac, but I wouldn’t spend a ton of money on a Mac just to be a Plex server. It’s not the most capable platform for HDR->SDR tonemapping.
