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Plex noob looking for advice
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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In terms of transcoding streams, the i5 8400T would win, hands down. The integrated GPU on the 8th Gen and higher Intel chips can do several 4K streams (like, 8+ or something crazy) simultaneously. The iGPU is just a beast. Be sure to enable hardware transcoding in the Plex server settings to use it properly. Look at Intel QuickSync for more info on that. Edit: I think this requires Plex Pass
That being said, if you're streaming media to a modern device, you should be able to direct play everything and won't need transcoding. I find transcoding is only necessary when people I've shared with are trying to stream and my bandwidth is too shitty to handle the full bitrate.
I see several options here:
Hardware transcoding of any kind does require a Plex pass.
Alright so I was definitely overthinking it. I’m gonna set it up tonight on the SFF PC.
I can get several terabytes of storage on it. If I end up making heavy use of this I can migrate the library to a NAS using the Thinkserver afterwards
Thanks!
Worth noting that certain clients such as the PS4 and PS5 apps have terrible format support and will result in transcoding if you're storing, say, MKVs. Something to look out for, but everyone else in this thread is on the money: don't worry too much about performance at this stage. That's a bridge you cross if and when you reach it
I used to run everything on a 4 TB and found it filled up really fast. 10-14 GB for a good quality 1080p movie, 3 GB per episode for the good shows, etc. It all added up really fast and I'd have to clean out old stuff pretty frequently.
I ended up buying a refurbished 14 TB HDD and it's been smooth sailing since then. I think I'm a little more than halfway through it right now.