I'm right now looking at upgrading my storage (bunch of USB HDDs attached to my mini) and am looking at NAS units. I love the idea of a linux PMS, and when serving my mac mini in the lounge it'll be fine. But my appleTV in the spare room, and my ios devices need transcoding, and the NAS won't work. I'd love to be able to use the mini as a transcoding unit, or my beefy gaming PC in the spare room. I'm happy to run a special instance of PMS on those devices, set to 'no library' or 'transcode only' mode or whatever. I'm aware that in some situations both machines will be switched off and that means some content won't be available to me. Thats fine. My main viewing is on the mini, and the spare room (and future bedroom) AppleTVs are used rarely enough that its simple to make sure my mini isn't sleeping before using. Maybe even have a 'wol' built into the client to help make it seamless? ('hey, we can't play this as your transcoding computer is sleeping. Want to wake it up? Yes/no)
It would allow me to have my mini sleep when not in use, saving power. Plus I can get a nice low power NAS and hide it away, removing ugly, noisy USB HDDs from my lounge
I came here to make the same request. I would like to have a low powered always-on computer to act as an file server/downloader/media server but that doesn’t work when I want to transcode to my ipad (at least not HD material). At the same time I have an old quad-core hackintosh doing nothing but I can’t get myself to leave it turned on 24/7, it would feel like leaving my car on while I’m not using it It would be great to be able to offload the transcoding to it when needed.
Wouldn’t a simple “right now” solution be to install PMS and mirror over the library. Now rename the sections to “transcode” to avoid a clash and get WOL working.
Then when you want to transcode, get the new server booted via WOL and start a session that way?
I have readynas ultra 4 wich transcodes non HD content perfectly. But I have alot of HD movies to fully utilize my HD beamer. When I’m on the go, I can’t watch these movies cause my NAS isn’t powerfull enough
I would love to have to option to offload this to another machine in the house over my Gigabit network.
Please Please Please Implement This in a future Release.
Yep came searching for a similar solution. Shame thread so old but doesn't seem it was given much thought. Having some sort of transcoding app installed on a few computers in the home, PMS can auto-discover the transcoding computers on the network and leverage them for serving media based upon who is least busy.
There would be a little overhead transferring the requested file to the transcoding device, but once there will stay until x time has passed without any requests for that video, or until the transcoding limit on that device (user configured) has been reached and the device has a new request to transcode another file, it'll clear out previous ones.
This would certainly be an amazing dynamic to add to the Plex setup!
I'm currently running PMS on my iMac using the media folders on my (old) Synology NAS. I would love to run PMS directly on the NAS, but that would mean giving up transcoding which is the main reason I run PMS - Plex on iOS is soooo sweet.
My main media centre is still XBMC on a Shuttle XS35-GT (with its own separate SQL library), but I am keenly watching Plex build up a mighty media-playing empire piece by piece, and I'm pretty sure that the day is not too far off now when I can retire XBMC and run a fully integrated all-Plex, all-the-time solution.
The idea discussed in this thread would be very interesting to me. Running my main PMS on the NAS for low-power and always-on reasons then offloading the transcoding heavy lifting to a PMS 'slave' on the iMac would really be a best of all worlds solution.
I hope this is something that could be considered for a future version.
I can feel that Plextopia is just around the corner…
I just completed my Plex setup on my NAS, and it just doesn’t cut it for transcoding capabilities. Being able to distribute transcoding would be a killer request.
've so many (client) devices on the network with plex, shifting the transcode process to any available higher powered CPU when local CPU doesn’t cut it is a no brainer, at least an option feature… a few extra hand-offs required… but would be a killer feature.
I would love this as well. I have an Intel NUC as my actual computer for surfing the internet on my tv and a few other things. Plex runs on my synology DS1515+ and sometimes can not keep up with the transcoding. Would be awesome if my NUC could handle some or all of the transcoding.
It would be great to be able to offload the transcoding to it when needed.
