May 13, 20206 yr Hey folks, thanks in advance for having a look here. I have an older I5-4460 unraid box that's strictly a plex server/file server. What I'm considering it installing windows as a VM to it, and installing a graphics card so I can use it to stream plex 4k content. The reason I'm thinking of this, is the server sits near my home theatre, I have an apple TV 4k but it doesn't direct play 265H files without having to be doctored, so I think this may be a more efficient way of going about it. Am I opening a can of worms by running a plex server and plex app on the same hardware, or would this be ideal?
May 14, 20206 yr It's fine to run the server and client on the same hardware. I guess you can try to see if it helps. Most of the transcoding work is decoding H265 which you just migrate from the server to the client in your plan. You do save on the re-encoding but then you lose some performance due to VM overhead. So it's not clear if it would achieve anything. Make sure to use membaloon so you free up some RAM for the server when the VM is idling. Set current RAM < max RAM in the template and install membaloon driver from virtio driver iso. Generally speaking, it's better to just get a (physical) client that can direct play if transcoding is a problem. Edited May 14, 20206 yr by testdasi
May 14, 20206 yr Author Yea, its the client that I'm struggling with. I have Apple TV 4k, which does a decent job, but with the 4k content, its fussy on what audio streams it will process, and plex doesn't give the option to send a lossless stream to my processor to let it do the heavy lifting, unlike infuse, which does it (but its an ugly interface). First world problems for sure lol. A friend of mine is building a HTPC strictly for this purpose, but I figured my unraid box is right beside my HT, why not see if I can utilize it.
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