I’m about to build out a new PMS and am having a hard time wrapping my head around planning/spec’ing for transcoding. Some prelim info:
Currently using a myriad of devices, including Fire TV, Android phones/tablets, smart TVs, etc.
Looking to push top-level 4k transcoding (I want transcoding on the stream vs. saving multiple file versions)
setting up a local RAID5 (for read speed with minal safety - I don’t care about interrupting playtime to rebuild if something dies)
using all SATA 6GB drives (probably 7200 RPM’s, but might go SSD if I still have read-speed limits)
Was planning on running Ubuntu server - but I heard that might be a blocker if I want to go with AMD
Core role of the machine:
primary playback for my whole private network (kids, wife, etc)
typical streaming case is 1x 4k + 2x1080p at once
be the file shepherd for the media centre (running a few apps for sorting, tagging, standardizing names, etc)
So my questions are:
what’s the deal with GPU’s? Some people say they are better for transcoding, others say they aren’t as good as CPUs. Basically, I need to know the bottom line
I heard AMD’s Ryzen chips are better for transcoding vs. Intel’s i7’s b/c they have more cores, which Plex can take advantage of. True?
if true, I’ve also read that Ryzen has serious Linux issues - so is it worth it still?
So the deal with GPU transcoding is you can typically get a faster transcode, but lower quality with GPU transcoding. Some might argue that it’s not even noticeable either. I don’t use a GPU for transcoding as it’s just not needed.
If you’re talking like 1x 4K HEVC transcoded and a couple of 1080p’s… it won’t require much. Especially if you’re devices don’t even need to transcode and can direct play. Your high end consoles can do direct play with HEVC 4k x265 content and 1080p usually isn’t much of an issue. It may transcode the audio.
Either way, if it were me and I knew it wasn’t going to be a huge load at all but I wanted something that would last… I’d probably look at going with Ryzen 2. Something like a 2700 or 2700x (the higher TDP should allow for better single core performance thanks to boosting on the X)… but you’ll want to get some 3200-3600mhz ram to pair with it to really make it pop.
I think that’d be a much cheaper set up.
As for Ubuntu and whatever with AMD. I can’t speak on that. I use unraid for my plex server and I couldn’t be happier. My build has dual Xeon E5-2665’s in it (so 16 cores and 32 threads), but I’m strongly considering selling the entire system (it’s a 4U 24Bay rack) and building something like a 32 core Threadripper 2 system. That way I have more than enough processing power for transcodes, and I can set up some VM’s and enjoy the good cpu usage for whatever productivity I see fit.
If you can confirm there’d be no issues with Ubuntu and AMD Ryzen 2… that will be you best choice imo. The Ryzen 2 2700 or 2700x.
I just built a new Plex server with an i5-8600. Haven’t tested multiple 4K streams yet but using hardware acceleration on the iGPU it has no problem transcoding a 4K HEVC Blu-Ray dump to 1080p H.264. If I remember right it was using ~20% of the encoder engine of the iGPU. I saw someone with a similar processor post a screenshot of 3 of these transcode streams running simultaneously.
Just being the minority report here, but i’ve always considered HDD space to be paramount… like you never can have enough TB with media files. Yeah a decent processor/mb is a must.
Yeah the 8th gen encode/decode engines on the i5 series iGPUs seem pretty capable. I went with an ASRock Z370M-ITX/AC. Wanted small form factor and cheap. I spent the money on RAM and CPU and cut costs everywhere else. My storage is on a NAS so I didn’t need space for disks.
If you’re going to be pushing several 4K HEVC transcodes, you’d need a decent amount of RAM too. Not 256GB of it, but you can’t get away with 4GB either. I’d say at least 32GB. And if by the sounds of it you’re preparing to keep just one copy of said 4K HEVC high-bitrate (>60-80Mbit) BluRay rip and then pushing it to maybe >5 devices by the means of full transcode through CPU due to quality issue with GPU. And that’ll take some real punch, like 2-4 high-end (>20K passmark) Xeon gold CPU’s. I’d say you’d be looking at spending at least $10 0000 to get that going for you. And even then you might struggle with some if you’d want to burn in subs for all of them or so.
Processor(s): 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650v1 (16c/32t)
Memory: 64GB DDR3-ECC
HDD: 2TB Drive
G Suite: 50TB+ of content
Servers from OneProvider.
I only have buffer issues because the server is hosted in a VM. If the server got the full dedicated specs, I’d have no problem with 10+ concurrent streams. You can build a pretty beefy server with used parts, for pretty cheap.
DDR3 ECC Memory will be the spendy part. I’m currently saving for a new Dual Xeon E5-2699v4 and 256GB DDR4 ECC Memory, with multiple SSDs for VMs and storage. I’ll drop it in a colo facility.
