December 3, 20169 yr I use my unRaid box primarily for Plex. I'd like to upgrade my server, but I also want to future-proof it if possible. Since 4K 10 bit HEVC videos are going to become a real thing, I was wondering if people had any thoughts on what hardware would be required for transcoding. From a quick search it looks like people have needed to resort to dual-Xeon processor setups to get satisfactory Plex transcoding. But that was just a few data points. Anybody else have anecdotes to offer? My naive guess is that the prevalence of 4K h.265 is going to force Plex's hand and they are finally going to have to implement Intel Quicksync support. If this is the case then I might want to wait until Kaby Lake to upgrade, since Skylake only supports up to 8 bit color for hardware-accelerated transcode.
December 3, 20169 yr Its tough to say, for sure people are able to achieve 4k streaming now with dual core Xeon setups, but my guess is in the near future you will be able to do that with a single CPU. You could buy a socket 2011 setup today and just wait until the next generation get released, not much else you can really do unless you want to invest in a dual Xeon setup now.
January 23, 20179 yr I'm going through the same thing at the moment. I've got one of the new Nvidia TV Shields, but no 4K display yet (looking at upgrading the projector later in the year). However, everything else is still 1080p and Chromecast (or web browser, or external). I'm currently using the fastest processor for my motherboard, and it's unable to cope with some 4K demo clips I've got. I've put these into a separate "4K tests" library for now. The best stopgap I can see for now is to use Plex's "Optimise" function to create 1080p versions of all 4K clips. I was experimenting at the weekend, and Plex seems to automatically pick this pre-transcoded version. Presumably, when going into the TV Shield and 4K projector, it will automatically direct stream the full version. Until hardware comes out that satisfies both unRAID and Plex, this seems like an option.
January 23, 20179 yr My prediction. Once UHD blurays are able to be ripped there's going to be a whole lot of upgrading going on ... Hopefully it will happen this year.
January 23, 20179 yr Plex has been beta testing iGPU accelerated decoding/encoding. There are reports that 4k transcoding is happening on setups with low-end CPU's as the iGPU has a highly optimized routine for it.
January 23, 20179 yr Plex has been beta testing iGPU accelerated decoding/encoding. There are reports that 4k transcoding is happening on setups with low-end CPU's as the iGPU has a highly optimized routine for it. That's interesting. Forgive my ignorance - I'm finding my way, is this something that unRAID owners could make use of now, or would upgrades still likely be necessary? Appreciate it's very vague, but whilst the unRAID architecture allows for storage and media serving in one box, they might have quite different hardware demands.
January 23, 20179 yr Plex has been beta testing iGPU accelerated decoding/encoding. There are reports that 4k transcoding is happening on setups with low-end CPU's as the iGPU has a highly optimized routine for it. That's interesting. Forgive my ignorance - I'm finding my way, is this something that unRAID owners could make use of now, or would upgrades still likely be necessary? Appreciate it's very vague, but whilst the unRAID architecture allows for storage and media serving in one box, they might have quite different hardware demands. See the last few pages of the LSIO plex thread for some discussion of GPU transcoding. Long story short is there are no drivers in unRAID for the dockers to use, so maybe a VM would be needed.
January 23, 20179 yr Plex has been beta testing iGPU accelerated decoding/encoding. There are reports that 4k transcoding is happening on setups with low-end CPU's as the iGPU has a highly optimized routine for it. That's interesting. Forgive my ignorance - I'm finding my way, is this something that unRAID owners could make use of now, or would upgrades still likely be necessary? Appreciate it's very vague, but whilst the unRAID architecture allows for storage and media serving in one box, they might have quite different hardware demands. See the last few pages of the LSIO plex thread for some discussion of GPU transcoding. Long story short is there are no drivers in unRAID for the dockers to use, so maybe a VM would be needed. Yup, you'd need to run Plex in a VM, and currently iGPU passthrough to a VM is beta (6.3+) and not stable AFAIK.
January 23, 20179 yr I've moved to Emby from Plex - the QuickSync transcoding is brilliant. I'm just using an i5 Broadwell NUC for Emby server at the moment. You can use a nVidia GPU now also, so no reason you couldn't pass through something like a GF750Ti and use that for transcoding.
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