I am getting ready to buy the 2018 MacMini to replace my 5 year old MacMini. The ONLY thing the Mini is used for is PLEX. I have my current Mini connected to a Synology 1819+ that stores all my media.
My question is does adding RAM help PLEX in any measurable way? Does PLEX use this extra RAM to help during transcodes? I have a few dozen users that I have given access to my media/PLEX server so I could have multiple, multiple streams at any given time and I am curious if maxing the RAM to 64GB will make things run smoother.
98% of my 2000+ movies are 1:1 rips of BluRays using MakeMKV (no handbrake here). The other 2% are DVDs where no BluRay version exists.
Basically, does PLEX make use of extra RAM to make things run smoother? If so, is there a maximum level of RAM that helps PLEX where going beyond that point I derive no benefit? I greatly appreciate any and all response(s)…
Thx.
I can’t speak to MakeMKV as I haven’t used it in a while but here’s my impressions about the 2018 Mini and transcoding.
The number of cores and ability to use multiple-threads leads to the best performance if relying on the CPU. Even though the i5 and the i7 are not too far apart in GeekBench4 scores the performance with the I7 is noticeably better than the two lesser CPUs.
But, all 2018 Macs have a T2 chip that also does hardware transcoding and if the software supports it via Apple’s hevc_videotoolbox codec, all perform virtually the same as the CPU is not involved.
My Mac mini i5 16/500 transcoding a 1.14 GB x264.mkv to x265.mkv took 44 minutes and reduced the file size to 353 MB but I could tell it wasn’t using hardware encoding as the CPU load stayed at about 97%.
Using ffmpeg with ffWorks GUI, I was able to select hardware acceleration and the same file ended up at a larger size, 467…5 MB, with the CPU load never going above 3% and the time elapsed was only 4 minutes!
I’m sure this can be tweaked as I’m new to ffmpeg and there are no How To’s that I’ve found to date.
HandBreak says they supportT2 hardware acceleration but it may only be available via the command line and I’ve not tried it as yet.
Hope this info helps…
No, RAM doesn’t change much for Plex.
