SonicUK

I've been looking into building a Plex 4k Transcoder NAS for a little while also and came to conclusion a c246 motherboard with either i3-8100 or E-21xxG would be the best option so it could do everything, and have ECC, was the best solution... but having been looking into it and Plex's capabilities (or lack of) around hw transcoding and specifically 4k HDR... and so reluctantly reached the conclusion even if i could achieve the aim of having a single server for Plex Transcoding and NAS there's little point - and it would cost a good amount to achieve it vs just building a dedicated NAS with older parts that don't support iGPU-based HEVC transcoding, and storing properly encoded version of 1080p films alongside 4k. It's a real shame, i have a couple of Nvidia Shield's i use and love also, but that's usually not possible when you want to watch something away from home, even with a 1GbE fibre connection and a 4k device - so the dream was to have everything in 4k and transcode as required - but the technology and Plex Media Server software just isn't mature enough to do this yet it seems. It's just too bleeding edge. I think for now i'm going to forget trying to transcode 4k HEVC on the fly, wait till everything else catches up, and instead build a NAS to store both 4k and 1080p versions of media.