Thank you for welcoming me here. I’m a long time user of streaming media servers, but absolutely brand new when it comes to Plex. I’m trying to decide if Plex Server has the right features for me. I do apologize in advance for failing to search & find the answers to my questions within these forums, but there are so many topics and my needs are quite specific. I appreciate your patience, and welcome any responses or suggestions. And, if you can point me towards a link that has more details relevant to my interest, I’m more than happy to do the research myself from there.
I’ve been running a DLNA streaming media server on hardware assembled from bits & bobs left over from years ago. It’s got a 4C/8T Intel Haswell architecture CPU (Xeon E3-1271) and plenty of RAM. I’ve also got a nVidia GTX 1060 available, which I’d like to use for GPU transcoding. I encode all my media (mostly video, with a tiny bit of music and photos) and store it on this server. My media players are mostly Android based, with one iOS device and one Samsung “smart” TV. All streaming is done strictly within the home, mostly over WiFi.
Recently, more and more of my content I’ve been encoding with HEVC (h.265) for the additional space savings it provides. However, quite a few of my older Android media boxes do not provide hardware acceleration for h.265 decoding. I would like to be able to transcode a file at the DLNA server, using GPU acceleration. My preferred output would be h.264, as every device I own will support that in hardware.
My current DLNA server does offer a mechanism to define a transcode profile for each client on my network, which makes it easy to assign codecs for each. However, this DLNA server does not support GPU acceleration, and the Haswell Xeon barely has enough horsepower to transcode one 1080p stream from HEVC to h.264. I really need a server that lets me use my graphic card’s capability for hardware decode/encode.
It’s also important to me to be able to seek forward and back within the file, even while transcoding. I think this can be done, but there may be some dependence on the client player’s seek functions. I’ve come to understand that “time based” seeking might be available, while “byte based” seeking is likely not possible.
Will Plex Server do what I am asking? I expect I would need to pay for the Plex Pass to get the GPU acceleration features, and I’m OK with that. Does Plex make for a good DLNA server to Android clients? Will I be able to use my familiar players (MX Player, VLC) or do I need to switch to some player specific to Plex? And can I manage some kind of client profiles, so transcoding only occurs for the clients which cannot natively handle h.265 (as some of them can)?
Thanks for listening.
