Good afternoon,
I saw in the FAQ the following
"The Guideline
Very roughly speaking, for a single full-transcode of a video, the following PassMark scores are a good guideline for a requirement:
1080p/10Mbps: 2000 PassMark
720p/4Mbps: 1500 PassMark "
But I was curious as to the ballpark requirement for higher bit rate videos. Like would a 20mbps 1080p video need 4000 PassMark score? or what about like a 35mbps blu-ray?
I just finished ripping all of the blu-rays I own and other than converting them to MKV I am leaving them as is. I haven’t had anyone complain about it being slow but I wanted to try to gauge how many people I should add to avoid issues (just want to avoid adding too many people and then have to boot someone out)
CPUs are Dual Xeon E5-2670s which score 12,531 each (not bad for the $70 each I paid for them haha)
The best judge of your equipment on your content will be how fast your transcoder is running. Check your logs during a transcode to see how quickly it is progressing. See this page for more information: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201575036-Why-is-my-video-stream-buffering-
Some blu-rays are encoded using the VC-1 codec. Plex’s transcoder can not utilize multiple cores when decoding VC-1 so even those powerhouses will have issues in this scenario. Avoid VC-1 and you should have no issues with multiple simultaneous streams.
Thanks for the Tips.
Hard finding the right balance between, Time to encode, Storage, CPU and Internet bandwidth.
Right now I have about 21TB (and another 21TB for backup) that is pretty much full. Re-encoding some of my TV shows (Star Trek TNG on Blu-ray for example is almost 1.4TB lol) and even that is going to take about 42hrs to complete. I think my 150/150 connection would limit me to about 5 blu-rays at a time which I don’t see happening (most of my friends have significantly slower connections, but that in turn means more transcoding)
I think at the very least ill look into converting my VC-1 Files to H264, I suspect a single core wouldn’t be able to handle the encoding
I don’t think your VC-1 content is going to give you issues in the least. The real expensive part of the transcoding is the encoding side, which is going to be H.264. It is only the decode that’s single threaded which is the cheaper portion of the two.
To put it in perspective: I do the same as you with full BD remuxes with both H.264 and VC-1 content (I only keep one audio track though to keep space requirements down). Due to a bug in the hardware decoder for VC-1, I have my Intel NUC do software decoding of the VC-1 content. It is an Intel Core i5 (Haswell) with a single threaded passmark of 1471. Your E5s have a single threaded passmark of 1614. Given that my NUC has no problems at all doing a CPU decode of full bitrate VC-1 content, I doubt your E5 will either.
