Possible to use separate machine just for transcoding?

General Discussions
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I’ve got Plex Server running on my Synology NAS and it’s been great for playing inside the house. The downside is that it doesn’t have the ability to do hardware decoding, so a friend trying to stream a 4K movie (transcoding to 1080) instantly pegs the CPU to 100% and results in huge buffering delays.

Is it possible to keep Plex Server running on the NAS, but have it go somewhere else on the network to do the actual transcode? I’d invest in a nice PC as a dedicated transcoding box if I could.

If the transcode is just an ffmpeg call I feel like I could prefix that with an ssh command and pipe the result back to the NAS across the network maybe? Or mount the NAS to the local filesystem of the transcode box?

Or is my best bet to just transfer my Plex Server to that dedicated PC and just use the NAS as storage?

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The short answer is, no.

The longer answer is that this is not (currently) supported. I have no indication that it is anywhere of Plex’s radar to do so.

There is a 3rd party project that does something akin to this, but YMMV, and it is not supported by Plex.

I personally have a synology nas and a linux server that does the lifting. The NAS is only storage in my world.

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Thanks so much for the reply! What kind of hardware is your linux server running? Is hardware transcoding happening only on the CPU or do you have a video card that can handle it instead? Looks like if you have an Nvidia graphics card you can only encode 2 videos at a time according to https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

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Ryzen 3700x, 32gb of ram and a RTX 2070. My use case maybe be a bit higher than yours though.

As far as sessions, use this patch.

I’ve had 16 transcodes rolling through it and it didn’t care.

As far as what model to get, I used this:

It’s pretty spot on.

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OMG thanks for the info, this is great. Is it worth spending anything for a top of the line CPU with this setup, or would that be a waste because all transcoding is automatically handled by the GPU?

Can I ask what your use case is? Are you running a white label Netflix? :slight_smile: I joke that’s what mine is for the couple friends I’ve shared with. I’ll have to start charging them $9.99 soon.

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Haha sadly no. I’m a systems engineer by trade so it’s doing much more than Plex.

I’d say any recent i5 or ryzen should be sufficient. Just enough to not be a bottleneck.

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Do you know offhand: let’s say you have this setup—Plex Server running on one box, and the storage on a NAS. When you start streaming on a client, if the client supports Direct Play, is it pulling the file directly from the NAS? Or does it have to make a trip through the Plex Server always? I’ve got a 10gb NIC in the NAS and wondering if I should have one in the Plex Server box as well so it’s not a bottleneck to moving files around…

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It will always pass through the server, but that won’t matter at >= 1gb/s speeds. (Unless you are exceeding a literal crap ton of simulations streams)

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