Hey all. Thanks in advance for the help. I have been using Plex for many years and love it! I have deployed servers all over with Plex as the main focus point . as for me, I have a couple freenas boxes that run Plex in a jail… Most recently I picked up an old lenovo s30 server tower with a e5-1620 . seems to do okay with 3 transcodes… I need to be able to facilitate about 6 to 8. I understand the 2000 passmark score recommendation but I am looking for experience in using an Xeon e5-2695 (12 core, 24 thread , passmark 16,000). I picked one up on eBay for a great price, and I understand they are usually paired with another one on a dual socket board giving a 20k passmark score. Any thoughts? Should I end up scrapping the system and move onto a new version of Xeon or do these older ones still pack a punch!!
On a side note, I read about Plex remote transcoder … Has anyone heard of headway on making that work with freenas or is it not a feesable way of extending performance due to the ever upgrading Plex. Thanks!
Is the quicksync a new feature with Plex? What verson of i7 are you referring to? So are you telling me you think a 12 core Xeon is incapable of transcoding 6 streams? I find that hard to believe. Thanks for the info on quicksync though!
I have a dual Xeon E5-2665 running Windows PMS and not found it especially capable at serving up multiple 1080p transcodes; about 4-6 before obvious signs of stress. A single 4K/HEVC transcode is all it could manage with SW transcoding.
It’s more to do with single-thread performance than processor or core counts. Single-thread performance of an older Xeon is just not that great compared to high-end i7. Xeons can be a fine value when it comes to juggling a lot of different applications but I don’t consider them adept at running PMS.
@dduke2104 said:
I have a dual Xeon E5-2665 running Windows PMS and not found it especially capable at serving up multiple 1080p transcodes; about 4-6 before obvious signs of stress. A single 4K/HEVC transcode is all it could manage with SW transcoding.
It’s more to do with single-thread performance than processor or core counts. Single-thread performance of an older Xeon is just not that great compared to high-end i7. Xeons can be a fine value when it comes to juggling a lot of different applications but I don’t consider them adept at running PMS.
Thanks for the great answer ! Makes a lot of sense. I will see how it does. I plan on putting a new box together regardless, so this is a temporary thing anyway. I will at least have a fairly high end server base for some ESXi in the end.
Yes hardware transcoding is in beta but is open for any plex pass member to use. You just need to download the special version from the forum. It supports QuickSync which is built into all recent intel iX procs as well as can use AMD and nVidia GPU cards (graphic cards).
I’m running this on a couple of old computers. 1 is a 1st Gen i7 and one an old 4 core xeon. Neither supports QuickSync. The i7 uses an AMD 280X GPU and the xeon uses an nVidia GTX 750. Both are 2 to 3 year old graphic cards. Hardware transcoding works just dandy on both.
Yes hardware transcoding is in beta but is open for any plex pass member to use. You just need to download the special version from the forum. It supports QuickSync which is built into all recent intel iX procs as well as can use AMD and nVidia GPU cards (graphic cards).
I’m running this on a couple of old computers. 1 is a 1st Gen i7 and one an old 4 core xeon. Neither supports QuickSync. The i7 uses an AMD 280X GPU and the xeon uses an nVidia GTX 750. Both are 2 to 3 year old graphic cards. Hardware transcoding works just dandy on both.
Very nice ! I wonder if I can get this to work with a gtx 670 on freebsd… Or Ubuntu. Is it a requirement to have a processor with quicksync or can you simply use a GPU? I do have a 3770k setup that I could use…
