hi. i actually have a Synology NAS in my Lan network at home with all my movies and TV shows . I am using an old PC computer as server but the power consumtion is huge as its running 24H. 7days long. I am starting to find out wich device will make a stable plex server with the less electrical consumtion runing 24 hours. I have read that Pi 4B cant transcode correctly some formats. So i am interested to know what device recomends me the plex comunity: Nvidia shield, Raspberry 4b, other?
thanks in advance.
Well I was a noob so I went with a brand name NAS. After reading reviews for a couple of weeks, I narrowed down my choice to a QNAP because the 4bay model had hardware transcoding, ran Plex, and used the least power, around 30W no load, 60W full load.
My experience is that my hardware transcode chip offloads the CPU entirely for any video transcoding. So Plex takes no extra power for that. Watching a video without transcoding, my NAS runs at 5% cpu. With only video transcoding, maybe 6%.
If, however, the audio needs transcoding, e.g. a DTS track being played on a 2 speaker device, well that can only be transcoded in software. So my multi-core Celeron goes to 100%. It barely keeps up if it’s TrueHD, but it works.
Unlike my above example, some 2 speaker hardware will transcode both the video and audio itself, completely offloading the Plex/NAS, e.g. an iPad Pro with builtin hardware decoding.
So when building your Rube NASberg, consider the case where you’ve transcoded things in advance or two years have gone bye and all your devices have builtin hardware decoding. In that case CPU load is a non-issue. That being a factor will mean you can build a very low power, cost effective system.
In my usage scenario, however, I don’t let Plex do scheduled deep video analysis. The only thing it does is generate chapter thumbs and metadata recheck, bundle clean. I’m pretty sure it’s the overnight analysis/optimization that makes Plex use a lot of CPU. Otherwise it’s like a quiescent web server. The NAS even goes into sleep mode when there’s no LAN activity.
Good Luck!
The Shield supports hardware transcoding, the Pi 4 does not. So, if you need transcoding go with the Shield. It’s as simple as that. And as always: forget 4K transcoding.
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