Will there ever be the possibility of having Plex be able to transcode on another server?
My set up at home consists of a powerful (energy intensive) i7 computer which I’m currently running PMS on. All my media is then stored on a Synology NAS which is also able to run PMS but lacks when it comes to transcode anything above 720p.
What I’d like to do is have PMS run on my NAS and then offload files that it needs to transcode to my other server. I don’t think Plex is currently capable of doing is but I was wondering if in the future there might be a feature like this added? It would be an excellent add on and would mean people could use a lot less energy while running PMS
I have a similar set up to yours - I7 (Skull NUC) pulling media from my Synology NAS 1815+.
You must be concerned about power consumption because why do you want the NAS to do the work!
My thoughts are the amount you could save by sending Transcodible media to big brother is negligible!
But you could set up 2 servers and tell the clients to switch to server #2 (the I7) if you are having trancoding issues.
Well what I’d like to be able to do is shut down the i7 server when it’s not being used, which would save quite a bit. I’m not sure I understand your point entirely
Actually I also have a similar request… You know that rendering programs could use network clients to share rendering work with other clients.
For example my Plex is working under a NAS on an Atom server ( AsRock C2750D4I ). While it’s pretty powerful by itself it may need a more powerful transcoder PC ( for 4K videos etc ). So, I also have a i7-6700K PC. Could it be possible to install a transcode server on this PC and Plex uses that whenever it’s available. What I mean is Plex should transcode media files on the server machine, but if the transcoder PC is available on network ( powered on ) it should prioritize to that machine for transcoding tasks. It would be better of course to share the work between machines, but what I suggest is easier to do because only one computer will transcode files like right now.
@trumpy81 thanks for your response. I’m aware of all this - 80% of my media is encoded as mp4 with aac audio which I’ve converted using ffmpeg, but it’s not really an answer to my question.
@trumpy81 Thanks for your response but in terms of network surely this is already happening. My server is accessing the media over the network to my NAS, transcoding it and then sending it to a player elsewhere in my house again over the network. My network is more then fast enough to handle ~4 streams at the same time + anything else tha tis going on the house. The only other thing that would then be put on the network would be the ssh commands to control the other server which really isn’t much of an increase in load. So at the moment I am doing exactly the same as you mention above (albeit not the SSH commands) and using a stack more energy to achieve the same results. It’s very inneficient
My use case is slightly different, though I agree this is a great idea. I’d like to have one view with local content and the live TV (a PCI card in a machine rather than an HD Homerun) in another machine that’s only used for that. This is because I have to have a computer beside the TV to get the antenna and I’d like to keep that super small. Presently that means I currently have to have two servers and switch between them or put everything on the weaker machine by the TV. I don’t want to have to buy a whole other grunty box for beside the TV when I already have an under-utilised Ryzen 7 1800x running Proxmox. I’d rather keep it all on one server, with the PCI card and be able to push it over to my Proxmox box for processing as requirements on the tuner box are above it’s capability.
