Hi, I just joined plex and purchased the basic membership. So far I’m so happy about it.
I’m running it on my full tower desktop and it consumes so much electricity.
I’m thinking to buy a mini pc. I’m looking for a mini pc that consumes under 40 watt and will be able to transcode at least 1080p with HDR support. I have a 2018 model 4K Samsung TV, I’m gonna watch 4K movies but mostly I will play movies that has plex direct play support. I may only need audio transcode.
In short, I’m looking for a low budget mini pc. I have two 4K Samsung TVs at home. In worst case scenerio, we will stream 2 TVs at the same time. I’m not looking for a 4K transcode monster. It will run 7x24.
I was thinking to buy a Intel NUC with Intel Celeron J3455 processor, I dont know if it is enough for my needs. I’m thinking to add SSD and make the ram at least 8GB. I’m open for recommendations.
Thank you for your help.
Depends on your source material. TrueHD transcodes can be tough for CPUs, dunno how well the Jxxxx CPUs handle that. For 1-2 streams this might be enough. For 1080p material they even have the capability for hardware transcode. I would nevertheless prefer a i3 or i5 solution if you can afford it.
The included “Pentium Silver J5005” processor supports hw transcoding – however it does not support VC1 (only decoding) and H265/HEVC (10bit). So you might run out of luck when it comes to some 4K materials.
For only a little more you can have a “proper” Core i3 processor that’ll also support the 10bit HEVC + a some halfway decent cpu power if some transcoding cannot be laid off to the iGPU.
Keep in mind… none of those processors is powerful enough to transcode 4K content via the CPU alone!
I found a NUC with i3 8109U ( NUC8i3BEH). I just want to be able to transcode 1080P with HDR support if I have to. Is this one a better option ? You have mentioned some proterties like VC1 / H265/HEVC (10bit), can this NUC support these ?
“none of those processors is powerful enough to transcode 4K” I know that, I’m counting on plex direct play because Samsung TV can handle 4K mkv files (I have tested it) but sometimes I’m having trouble with the audio codec and that’s where I need the help of plex. I hope it can only transcode audio of 4K content fluently. Also, subtitles
from what I’ve seen/found, none of Intel’s iGPUs support VC-1 hw transcoding (only hw decoding) – which should be fine as most devices will ask for the content to be transcoded to h264 anyway if they cannot deal with the original source material.
Although I don’t completely know what you are up to, transcoding and HDR normally doesn’t work. HDR files either need to be direct played or their colors are a mess, because Plex does not tonemap hdr to SDR yet.
