4K HDR to SDR Plex Transcoding, does it work with both Intel and Nvidia?


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Was planning to do a Ryzen build for a few reasons, primarily wanting pcie4 flexibility and because my main rig is also Ryzen so it makes trouble shooting much easier with spare parts etc.

 

With that said, the Intel 10900 are really pushing down to a very compelling price. And I can (mostly) work around the rather crappy z490 mobos pcie4 limitations (for example I can run the NVMe drives I want off the main pcie3x16 slot via an expansion card if I don't need a GPU).

My main concern, is anyone actually running 4K HDR to SDR transcoding on Plex? I know the feature is a recent addition, but i'm wondering how badly it hammers the GPU. I can't find any info on how many streams is ossible or the required VRAM on Nvidia cards per stream etc. Would love any info people can provide on it. It would be great if I didn't have to store two copies of HDR content...

 

I think i'm still leaning towards an X570 setup and dedicated GPU, though I must admit the simplicity, less power, and likely more support for an Intel inbuilt gpu is certainly compelling... Especially with current GPU pricing.

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Hrm that is a little unfortunate. Was hoping for a bit more power than that. Unfortunately even the 10900 uses the same iGPU. That would likely be the chip I pick up, as Plex is a secondary situation for the server. 
 

The convenience of it all is right there though. Probably be an easier decision if there was easier to find stock, but hard to juggle wants via needs when there’s so few things left to buy!

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4 hours ago, whipdancer said:


You are expecting to do more than 6 4K-HDR to SDR transcodes at the same time?

 

I am not expecting it now, however I am expecting ~4 quite reasonably (as I already have that, I just am currently having to encode multiple copies of things so users don't get fed the high quality version). And more and more content is being released in 4K HDR. Plus I need to have some side capacity for other things on the server. So it's just not quite as cut and dry as am I using that many transcodes right at this very instant. If I went with Intel, i'd be forced to do a motherboard/cpu change if I wanted more capacity (and have to wait for the XE chips to be released). I wouldn't be able to drop in a GPU as a quick fix as i'd be using the pcie3 16x slot for an NVMe expansion card and require the full bandwidth for drives. Because Intel is so behind and not supporting pcie4 fully yet the support for multiple NVMe drives is terrible, along with fairly average pcie slot throughput (the moment I put something in the second slot on most of their boards it will drop to pcie3 x8 x8, which is barely enough for two decent NVMe drives, let alone the 4 I want to run in the expansion module).

So yeah, was hoping for something a little more future proof is all. Might just be a case of eating up the costs of an upgrade down the line. Just difficult as it would likely mean a new install or at least a LOT of changes to make things work. And likely wouldn't actually have release quality unraid support for quite some time too.

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I quit worrying about transcodes.  My normal devices play 4kHDR+ natively and I keep either a 720 or 1080 version, with only an AAC stereo track for anything else that cannot natively handle 4k (ipad, phone, etc).  I'd rather eat more space for now (that is easily recoverable if push comes to shove, not mention cheaper to upgrade), then worry about hardware specs.  My next upgrade will be to a Ryzen 5000 series CPU (currently on a Ryzen 2000 series).  At that time I will upgrade to use RAM for transcoding as well as add a current gen GPU.  If one of my family members complains before that upgrade happens, then I tell them to pick a different movie (unless they want to pay for the upgrade themselves).

Edited by whipdancer
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