this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I’m looking to move from a Synology NAS with Plex to get something dedicated that is more powerful/can do more transcoding streams at once.

What is everyone using and how many streams can you transcode at once?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I know someone else said this but I would just get an i5 with a iGPU, I also have an 8000 series i5 and when it was new I did some load testing and it could do 5-10 transcodes at a time no problem.

ETA: Even a NUC with an iGPU is great, I have several friends doing that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There is also an other approach: encode your media a priori into a format that you can play direct, and then you don't have to worry about transcoding performance. The advantage of this is that you can likely get better quality encodes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

That’s basically what I’ve been doing using Other Transcode. My concern was that if I have a 4K source and using that would I someday regret it and want to re-encode things?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've used as little as a virtual machine running on my gaming computer to a full blown dedicated server. Really for transcoding as long as it has some cpu cores you can have a good dedicated older machine running plex fine. You don't need a gpu at all for a handful of streams. I think my max concurrent was 5 ever and I only upgraded for maintainability purposes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Depends what you’re transcoding to… show me a CPU (without a built in encoder like recent ones) that can handle a 4K HDR transcode…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I might just have lower standards here, but most of my content is 1080p at best for movies. Having 2k 4K HDR releases just isn't viable for most people, now at 1080p it is a bit more palatable. I incorrectly assumed his content composition, so yes my setup isn't for all scenarios.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I have it on my Synology NAS as well and I just let it preencode everything so that the stream doesn't need transcoding when clients request it. It consumes more space but the convenience is more important to me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I have a 1660 from my old machine and it seems to handle transcoding multiple 4K streams easily. Pretty low power draw as well, I doubt there’s much need for anything more powerful unless your files are in av1 or something.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I just got a used NUC and it works well and takes up little space.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Which one did you end up getting? There are quite a few options.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I believe I have a NUC7i7bnh. It’s perfect for Plex and quick sync is great on it. I run

  • Plex

  • Radarr

  • Sonarr

  • NZBGet

And it never chokes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I thought I replied earlier. I believe it’s a NUCi7bnh.