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In order for me to benefit from the Intel Quick Sync on my i5-7500 do I need Plex Pass? What can I expect for improvements if so? Currently can run 3 - 720p transcodes at once but once the 4th start it can buffer a bit. Internet is not a problem, I have 300Mb/s download, 100Mb/s upload.
That’s a Kaby Lake CPU, which means it supports decoding video in hardware up to HEVC 10-bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding
Unless you have full Bluray quality audio on every movie, you should see a healthy increase in the number of concurrent transcodes.
I’m stressing the audio aspect, because as such, the CPU is not exactly top-tier in terms of computing power: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-7500+%40+3.40GHz&id=2910
Which means that the limiting factor could now be the audio transcoding. Which requires transcoding to AAC in many cases and this cannot be delegated to hardware transcoder units.
To amend Otto’s response…
Yes. HW transcoding w/ Intel Quick Sync will require a Plex Pass membership.
I’m personally on a i5-7500T which is basically a lower-power version of yours – works pretty smooth (might however well be because my Apple TV is now able to direct-play my audio streams… so I’m not necessarily running into the potential issue Otto has described.
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