Plex on V5

[French-Guy]

OK, sorry for my ignorance, but:

I'm running V5 as a Vanilla server (a basic server to stream thru my WD TV Live - I have 4 of them)

I do not have any plugin, and even the hardware is basic (Sempron LE-1100). But it works just fine, and I can stream at least on 3 TV at the same time (2 over wifi and the other one is cabled)

I was wondering what would be the benefit of running PLEX on my server? I understood PLEX was useful to transcode movies, but since my WD TV Live can read almost any format, do I need PLEX?

[mr-hexen]

Then plex will give you a pretty interface and maintain watched and resume status.

[tdallen]

do I need PLEX?

No, not if you are happy with your WD TV Live's.  Plex supports a wide variety of devices that don't know how to read directly from a NAS.

[French-Guy]

OK, I understand

What would be the minimum CPU to transcode 3 HD streams in the same time (max) but still at a budget, and power consumption friendly?

[tdallen]

The rule of thumb is 2,000 Passmarks per 1080p stream.  In reality it depends on your source media and the capabilities of your players.  If your media is already encoded and bit-rate reduced (say, via Handbrake) to closely match the capabilities of your players then your server would have to do little or no transcoding.  On the other hand if you store full bit-rate BD rips then your server has to do a lot of work - I can max my 4,000 Passmark server transcoding a high bit-rate BD rip.

 

Without knowing what you have for media, for three 1080p streams you might be able to get away with a high-end Core i3 but a Core i5 or better is a safer recommendation.  If you pre-encode your media to support direct play on your players, you can drop that down to a lower end Core i3 or even a Pentium.