Server Version#: TBD/Newest
Player Version#: TBD/Newest
Hi,
I’d like to know few thing before going all the way with Plex.
What kind of hardware would you need in order to serve 100-1000 clients, knowing that transcoding will happen here and there.
What kind of hardware would you need in order to serve 100-1000 clients WITHOUT transcoding.
Can you avoid the stress job of transcoding, by making 3 resolution categories for each video file? Something like Smartphones/Tablets, Desktops, TVs?
If all the files are in Plex’s native format (MP4 I believe) then transcodig will only change the resolution based on the client’s device, which will be much faster than full-transcode, correct?
If this is for some kind of school/college, there are already a few deployments of Plex in this kind of field. Support can probably put you in touch with them for a direct exchange of experience.
Getting a custom license won’t be an issue, at least on my end.
I just want to know if it will be worthwhile in terms of the hardware. I would talk directly with the Plex team but they don’t have a convenient instant support like chat etc.
Hardware will be the bottleneck for you. Read speeds from the data storage will be a major bottleneck, as will bandwidth.
My friend runs 48TB system of HDs with a Ryzen processor and gigabit bandwidth. He has had 10 remote users streaming simultaneously without issue.
Even if you could achieve a “no transcoding” playback, just do the simple math:
Take the average bitrate of your video (of course you’ll have to consider the short bitrate peaks in it, if several users are starting playback synchronously)
and multiplicate this by the number of concurrently streaming users.
Then see if this is a value that a single server can handle. With several hundred users, probably not.
And Plex is not made to scale across several machines.
With a lot of techical knowledge, this can be tweezed a bit, yes. But I don’t think you can achieve 1000 simultaneous streams, while using one database/server.
If this guy is gonna be making content available to 100-1000 people then he is gonna need something levels beyond Ryzen. We are entering VMWare box territory with this requirement.
