Ram Transcoding on Mac OS

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Is anyone able to provide step by step instructions on how to set up transcoding in a ram drive on MacOS?

I have RamDiskCreator who but I am not clear how to point Plex to use the Ram to transcode, I currently have it pointing to:

/ram_transcode/Temp

Temp being a folder within my ram disk named ram_transcode. Is this correct? Is there any way with Plex or within MacOs to check that the disk is actually being used?

Any suggestions on what the size of disk should be would also be appreciated I have 32gb installed on a i5 MacMini 2018.

Is there a way to do this without a ram disk? If so, how?

It would be really useful if Plex gave you a tick box that did all the background stuff for you.

Does hardware encoding completely bypass the need for disk space for transcoding?

1 Like
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Did you find a solution for this? I’m also looking for instructions on how to get Plex RAM transcoding setup on my Mac Mini.

3

Yes, create a RAM disk (mine is 16gb of the installed 32gb) and then drag the volume to the Transcoder temporary directory under the Transcoding menu in the preferences page.

4

you can mount/create your ram drive any path you want (anything inside it gonna disappear when you reboot)

it doesn’t matter what path inside the ram drive, plex will create/delete its own sub folders for each transcode

you do not want to use the same path for any other applications.

in other words, /ram_transcode/Temp is fine just use it only for plex (because plex will add/remove from it as needed)

I recommend 32gig as the mem ram drive, with 64 gig of computer ram.

You can use less, however you may encounter transcoding errors if you have a large number of transcoding streams/users, and/or dvr recordings.

not sure what you mean by ‘this’?

  • you certainly do not need a ram disk to transcode.
  • transcoding to ram does not make it faster (the bottleneck is going to be however fast the connection is between your server and users)
  • there are different ways/types of ram disk
    ( ram disk types - Google Search ) I am sure google will also tell you what options are available on mac.

plex isn’t a ram drive creator, so sure it would be nice, but really has nothing to do with plex at all.

hardware encoding or decoding has nothing to do with the disk space needed for transcoding.

ram drive will NOT make your system transcode faster (that is dependent on your CPU or GPU).

the only reason to transcode to ram is to help avoid unnecessary writes to ssd drives.

unless you have an extremely slow hard drive, changing the transcoder temp to (or leaving it on) a regular non-ssd hard drive, is normally sufficient.

and if your hard drive is that slow that it causes problems transcoding, you got bigger problems that you should be fixing.

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Hey, thanks for the tips. I’m running the Mini with 64GB or RAM and its for PMS exclusively - so, I’ll do a 32GB RAM disk.

I see there’s a few RAM disk utilities out there. Is there one you’d recommend?

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I don’t use Mac sorry I don’t have any recommendations.

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