Audio streams, wrong containers, wrong codecs FBR vs VBR all can have significant impact on transcoding in Plex. Its an issue that bite everyone in the ass. Go and have a look both in their forums and on their website about transcoding. I have been using Plex for years both personally and on installs. Or move to a NAS that is hardware optimised to transcode.
Plex media player mac Pc#
So forget Firesticks and TVs Plex clients, you really want Nvidia Shields / PC / Mac or Apple TVs. That given, you therefore need the fastest clock-speed per core or or more cores.Īs others have said, transcoding on the server should be your last resort - correct encoding for the display device should be first and hardware decodong at the device should be your next alternative. So already you can see that with an i5 you have run out of available cores to transcode, hence your processor will become your bottleneck. (Yes I know it can hyperthread but those threads are also needed for other tasks) Each one of those cores is dedicated to a separate transcoding task So unless you have an i7 with 6 cores you only have 4 cores available to you. Plex can now make use of GPUs to help with transcoding but Mac Mini GPUs are pretty pants so it wall fallback to the CPU and will use all of the cores it has available. So assuming that you have enough bandwidth to run multiple streams outside of your network your Mac Mini is your problem. Transcoding can take a huge overhead and multiple stream transcoding can be even more taxing, its not just 1 stream is 70% of processor so 2 streams is 140%, 2 streams could be way over 200% depending on what is being transcoded to what device. I'd echo what Next010 is saying - rather than spend money on a mega-server, instead buy players that can handle all the required formats and/or as I've advocated, transcode offline, and then you only need basic file serving hardware in your media tank. The money you save on super power processors in your servers (and the increased running costs) can instead be spent on the additional storage required (if needbe) and you'll have a much better usage experience (including trick play which real time transcoding struggles with.) where the ultimate in picture and audio quality doesn't really matter.
Plex media player mac full#
That may mean you need to store two copies of the media to ensure compatibly with all your clients, but I'd go with one super-duper full fat version for the "big" TV with the attached multi-channel audio system where quality "matter" and one "basic" (say) Mpeg2 (or maybe H264 these days) with stereo audio - ie maximum compatibility - for the phones, ipads, kitchen TV etc. Instead of transcoding in real time, do it once "off line" whence you can let it run for hours in order to get everything "just so" without having to worry that anything is being compromised to "keep up" with real time requirements. It'll run cooler and quieter, use less electricity, the results will be the same every time and multiple concurrent streams will not effect each other (unless you have ultra slow HDD's or want more then half a dozen (or so) streams running concurrently.) Then all the server has to do is serve files and pretty much any hardware will be able to handle that. I've long opined that IMHO the best way to deal with real time transcoding is to just not do it at all. So really, we ought to turn the question on it's head and not ask "what hardware do I need" but instead "what compromise am I prepared to accept for the hardware I have." Of course, the more streams one wants to transcode concurrently, the more this is exasperated. (and it depends on the source and target formats involved.) not much compression, artifacts in the images, etc. that is adequate for the job, or I guess more correctly we've yet to see anything that exceeds the requirements (whatever number of streams.) Real time-coding will take as much processing capability as it can get and if the hardware is inadequate, then the trans-coding process will be compromised in some way - e.g. With real time trans-coding, there's not"magic" hardware spec.
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