For years I have run a Plex server for myself and family from home which used two (8tb) external hard drives and whatever laptop I’m using at the time (usually the higher end i7 version)
I sold my laptop 2 weeks ago and just figured I would get a cheap laptop to run plex from for us. It was a Samsung i3 120gb ssd. It went great until 2 ppl logged on and it couldn’t handle more than one transcode at a time lol. Started buffering bad.
I was hoping to just get an iPad Pro for my daily work flow and let that cheap laptop be just for torreents and plex but that’s obviously out lol
Am I really gonna have to get another i7 laptop just for torrents and plex along with this expensive ass iPad Pro? Lol. Suggestions??
You really need to be more specific.
Saying i3, i7 means little.
A new i3 is far more powerful than a five year old i7. Hardware acceleration (quicksync). Is it
enabled. If not is that a Plex Pass feature (No idea.)
If your requirements are those couple of transcodes then a Shield may be your solution tion.
Anything beyond that though you need to be far more specific than I changed from a CPU from some time this decade to another CPU from sometime in this decade.
That’s before we even start on the type of files you share, your upload bandwidth etc…
Lol. It was a 2010 Samsung laptop. I download my movies in 1080p ac3 or eac3. Transcodes remotely to audio aac and 720p for them and direct plays here at home for me. 150 down, 12 up.
You’ve still not given much detail, so I’ll just cut it short.
A 2010 I3 will usually barely be powerful enough to transcode two 1080p streams to 720p, let alone with anything running in background.
So, summarized, yes, you would have to get a more powerful machine to do transcoding for more than one person.
Or, use handbrake or other app to pre-transcode down to 720p all your higher rate movies.
I find that my 2013-2014 haswell i7 4790 will do 2-3 remote mp4 to mpegts transcodes and several direct plays locally if I keep my HD at 720p/~4kbps/640ac3.
It’s not the best quality, no, but, doesn’t strain the bandwidth or cpu as much, and looks great on mobile, decent on bigscreen.
