New Mac Mini i5 or i7 for PMS 4K? Upgrading my Nvidia Shield 2017

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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I am currently running PMS on an Nvidia Shield 2017, and it has been working great for about a year. But all my content has been 1080P, and usually have one local stream, sometimes one remote stream, both clients being Roku UItras.

However, recently I have been getting some 4K content, and even locally, the Shield simply cannot serve them up, just spins, loads, spins, reloads. I tried using Roku Ultra and Shield itself as clients.

Most of these files so far look to be h.265 HEVC in an MKV container with around 40-60 Mbps bit rate. Not sure if it is trying to direct play or trying to transcode. I would prefer not to optimize them (I found it to be finicky with the Shield, and the Shield usually can’t handle playback very well when it is optimizing).

Also, all my media lives on a Synology DS216j NAS in RAID1, which is just mounted over the wired network.

So now I am looking to get a new 2018 Mac Mini. I read this older Plex support article, and it looks like the i5 should be enough to handle 2 x 4K transcodes, maybe even 3:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/

But I’m not sure on a couple things:

  1. Since the i7 has 6 physical cores and 6 virtual cores, will Plex be able to take advantage of them?
  2. The article does’t mention anything about RAM, so wondering if I should step up to 16GB over the stock 8GB?

In other words, should I get i5 or i7? And 8GB or 16GB of RAM? Just trying to save a few hundred bucks.

Thank you for the assist, and I’m happy to consider other ideas (other than building a Windows or Linux box).

Chris

FYI, here are the Passmark Scores I found:

i5-8500 3.0GHz
11940 Multi Core
2410 Single Core

i7-8700 3.2GHz
15155 Multi Core
2630 Single Core

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Just a quick update. By using the Nvidia Shield as a client, I was able to get 4K to Direct Play on several videos, but had to turn off subtitles. Roku was a mixed bag.

But it doesn’t solve my problem of remote clients trying to stream a 4K source, especially using something like a Roku, and I have been experiencing general audio dropout issues with the Shield for months, which is why I abandoned it as a client in the first place.

I am just giving in to optimizing media for remote playback or clients that just don’t play nicely with the 4K source, and I think the i5 should handle the optimizations tasks well enough based on what I have read, and hopefully it won’t ever need to transcode 4K (video at least). It certainly should do better than the Shield.

I went ahead and ordered the i5 with 8GB and 256GB, and will just add a USB 3.1 SSD & upgrade the RAM myself later if necessary.

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It’s know issue for months I guess. It’s so frustrating that Plex won’t fix it. Nvidia shield is perfectly capable to play directly whatever You would like to play, including 4K HDR Dolby Atmos (passtrough or even downmixing). Basically kodi on shield can do this right now.

You can however use plex addon on kodi… and You can direct play everything from PMS. It’s pity native shield app cant, as this much better integrated with android tv, but, well, plex ignoring this for months.

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And BTW. It absolutely make no sense to buy powerful PC to play UHD content via plex, as it ivolves transcoding. Even if Your server would be powerfull enough to do this, You will basically miss HDR, and currently plex transcoder has no tonemapping. So HDR videos will look washed and ugly. Just don’t do it. Use kodi - and enjoy 4K in full details right now.

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It is amazing how capable the Shield is, and how it has such a low power draw and is silent. But it is always the little details that make or break an experience.

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So what happens is that I have shows that exist in 4K only, and let’s say I can play them fine locally.

But for my remote users, it looks like I will need to optimize them to something Direct Play friendly as well as down res to 1080 or 720.

So if I try to use the Shield to do this Optimize function, it has a few issues I can see:

  • Setting up locations for the optimized media becomes more complicated, since Shield needs a writable location, and the source NAS location isn’t writable for “place optimized media in same folder as original”
  • When Shield is optimizing media, it struggles to also serve up streams locally
  • I have to think it will take much longer to optimize than something like an i5

But I could be wrong. I need the new Mac Mini to replace an aging 2010 anyway for some other Home Automation stuff, so I will need to see how it plays out.

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Ah Yes. If You need to optimize for remot streaming then indeed You need something more powerfull than shield. But frankly I would rather optimize everything overnight instead of doing on-demand transcodes. Not sure however if there is automation option for this in plex.

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