About 4 months ago, I built a NAS using an Intel i5 7600K CPU at 3.8 GHz. When viewing a 4k movie, I was getting the error “The server is not powerful enough to convert this video for smooth playback. Try playing the original quality.” Looking at my server CPU usage, yup, it was at 90% and higher. Definitely not enough CPU. The passmark rating for this CPU is about 9000.
This week I purchased an R720 with dual Xeon E5-2660 @ 2.2Ghz. These processors have a combined passmark rating of 16,400. I am still receiving the same error on my device (Samsung S8 on home network) but when I look at the CPU usage, it maxes out at ~35%. Clearly there is additional CPU that can be used, but Plex is giving me an error saying there isn’t enough power.
I cannot identify the issue.
There is plenty of CPU on this server
The 10k SAS hard drives are in a RAID 10 configuration and definitely fast enough. Drives are faster than gigabit ethernet.
Streaming to my device isn’t the bottleneck, I am on my home network running Ubiquiti APs with excellent coverage.
I would look at this thread: Transcoding 4k Requirements. Best solution always is to have your media in a format compatible with your player specs, then no transcoding is required.
I don’t agree with that being the best solution (or even a solution at all). I can’t predict what devices family or friends will be stream to and, therefore, can’t predict what formats I need. Even more so, holding on to multiple copies of each title in case it will need to be transcoded (where I am still guessing) is not a cost effective work around.
I’m tired of hearing a solution of “Don’t do it” when discussing 4k transcoding. That isn’t a solution.
Did you look at the information provided on the link? Based on the specs of your computer and what is stated in the link you are probably maxing out the core being used for transcoding. You have a 4 core processor, I am assuming the transcoder process is single core, so you have one core running at 100% with the other three cores running at 5% combined so your processor shows 30% utilization. Since the device you are using requires transcoding of the 4K video and the one core of the processor is maxed out with the transcoder process you are getting the message “The server is not powerful enough to convert this video for smooth playback. Try playing the original quality.” Does it play fine on a client device that can Direct Play the 4K video?
