I am planning a server build for under 1k, not including drives, that I can use for transcoding and storage. I know I can use direct play and things like that, but with my situation that’s not a good solution without keeping several copies of every piece of content I have. So I’m looking for something that can handle the most transcoded streams at once.
I’m not against building something, or buying used on ebay. I prefer rackmount to just keep everything more uniform.
To explain a bit more, I’m going to be moving soon, combining more than 2 families, and getting rid of cable that some of them are used to. I plan on 6 to 10 streams at any one time, from various devices. Any suggestions on parts or used servers that I could use to accomplish this?
Sorry about the triple post, not sure why that happened. Maybe the bad internet on my phone.
6-10 concurrent transcodes? To what from what under which network circumstances? 4k x265 80Mbit to a WIFI connected iPad at 2Mbit 720p with subs?
Yes sorry. Transcodes. There will be many clients hitting the server at different times, android phones, tablets, raspberry pi’s, as well as some clients that support direct play, such as xboxes, pc’s, etc.
Everything that can be wired, will be. And a lot of the streaming I do is with subs. I’m not 100% sure what quality most of my files are in off the top of my head.
You are going to have a hard time getting 6 concurrent transcodes going. The rough estimate of 2k passmark score per transcode is a fairly low-bit 1080p of 10Mbit, without subs nor vc1. If you take that 2k x 6 we end up with 12k in passmark score for just transcoding. There are very few CPU’s that can handle that type of load. You will also need to have some power left on the server to handle OS and Plex itself, and don’t forget about those subs.
Look at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html and search for CPU’s that lies above at least 15k in score. I’d estimate that that is needed to even stand a chance.
In the future you might have an easier time getting there since Plex are working with Hardware transcoding, but that is not really ‘there’ yet. Still in alpha phase and a lot can change (and probably will) - http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/250946/plex-media-server-hardware-transcoding-preview-3-1-6-0-3720#latest
In that case, it may be working by the time this goes into production. I already have some graphics cards that may work and I may be able to get a much cheaper server. Thanks for the heads up.
