I’m looking into getting myself a small (size) Plex Media Server feeding my Apple TV Gen.4 and the upcoming Apple TV Gen.5 (UHD, HDR) with various content.
I’m not sure how powerful hardware is really required to get this working perfectly. As long as I can get Direct Play / Direct Stream I guess it doesn’t really require much hardware at all. Even a half-decent Q-NAP NAS would suffice? Something with a Intel Celeron or Pentium Dual or Quad-Core?
The big question is, how about transcoding? I see that Synology claims that their X86 Intel NAS-devices are capable of transcoding UHD due to hardware accelerated transcoding (using Intel QuickSync?). I’m not completely buying this marketing jimbo.
I know from past experience that transcoding 4K/UHD is really, really resources intensive. Even my previous server running a Intel Xeon E3-1270v1 Quad-Core, Eight-Thread CPU was struggling a whole lot transcoding 4K/UHD on the fly. But as I was running a NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 graphics card I didn’t have Plex Hardware Transcoding support.
Which brings the question. How good is hardware transcoding? And what does it actually support? Is Plex Hardware Transcoding using Intel Kaby Lake able to utilise Intel QuickSync and it’s 8-bit HEVC encoding? What does it really do and would it make even a 2-core/2-thread Kaby Lake CPU able to transcode 4K/UHD?
SkyLake and KabyLake microarchitecture CPUs with integrated GPU are of sufficient performance for HW transcoding at some level. Observed quality and performance is entirely based on input media (H.264 vs 265, 8 bit vs 10 bit, source video bit rate vs target viseo bit rate)
Do also note that just because Synology/Qnap say “we support hardware transcoding”, does not mean that Plex uses it. As of now, there are few appliances within the Plex world that are using hardware transcoding (Nvidia Shield and the WD Passport comes to mind). Plex has an alpha out to test how it will work for the rest of us, but it is far from ‘there’ yet, and not something I would recommend using as of right now.
of course right now… especially with regards to apple tv… seems like many are having issues with clients that can and should direct play/stream a file having the content forced to transcode… whether its the client requesting it or the server is still unanswered and unfixed… started seeing this back as far as 1.7.2 ish server side and about 3 updates ago apple tv side…
hanging your hat on a server with no trascode ability hardware wise means that in a situation like this… where all of a sudden your media format is deemed as not direct play/stream you will be dead in the water …
other features of plex like live tv and dvr to an extent almost always requires some server side horsepower.
how plex handles the new apple tv formats, 4k, dolbyvision etc will be interesting… there has been no words from the devs on the few threads where I have seen people ask… and the current client has enough issues with formats it should be playing now but doesnt…
many have gone to other apps like vnc and mrmc or other clients in frustration.
I’ve decide to toss 2x Seagate IronWolf 10TB drives into my fiancee’s desktop and will use that for Plex. We are rarely in any situation where I use Plex without her seeing something with me and while not running Plex the Plex Server shouldn’t really be taxing her system in a way that affects her gaming performance.
By doing this we will have a Intel Core i7-3960X 6-core @ 4.0GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 (for hardware transcoding if that ever comes viable in a stable release down the road) so it should at least be fully capable of 1080P high-bitrate transcoding.
I also have a spare Intel Xeon E3-1270v1 Quad-Core and a Asus P8B-E/4L motherboard and 8GB ECC DDR3 around. I could toss this hardware along with the 2x IronWolf 10TB drives into a separate system. The only drawback with doing so is that we don’t really have any sensible place to put said computer.
