Plex Pro Week ‘22: Let’s Talk Transcoding



In this in-depth session, Linus gets into the delightfully nerdy, nitty gritty details of Hardware Transcoding, Plex Dash, and a lot …

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32 thoughts on “Plex Pro Week ‘22: Let’s Talk Transcoding”

  1. How feasible is it to move the Plex server to a PC with a great graphics card and wirelessly connect to a media library on a NAS which is directly connected to the router vs running both on the NAS which has inferior transcoding abilities?

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  2. I've never used the built in converter. Often the best option is to have two files – one in 4k or whatever and the other in a more streamable size like 1080p or 720p

    In some cases you might have to reencode the 4k video proper. My Plex server for example sometimes gets mad at 4k h265 but plays well with h264.

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  3. Nice, I didn't think plex would sponsor a cry baby that he isn't making enough money from ad revenue from YouTube. 🤦‍♂️ 🤦‍♂️ 🤦‍♂️ 🤦‍♂️

    Seems that money can't by class.

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  4. Now, that being said, can we get automatic optimization? Per Library…
    If I set up that i want 720p optimized files, anything I put in the library that is higher than 720p should be "optimized"
    So far all I could find is individual optimization

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  5. This is a step in the right direction for Plex, but they do have some challenges ahead.

    As user of plex, we neeeeeed a way to limit the selection of video qualities available to a user so they don't transcode at qualities you don't have the files for. I just don't have hard drive space for every type of file

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  6. This is Plex PRO week? Come on. This is "let's get beginners more interested in Plex" week. No disrespect to Linus, there's nothing wrong with this type of content, but no "Plex Pro" is learning anything from this or any of the "peo" content this far.

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  7. Rule #1 in transcoding: do not share 4K video! Manage your library by putting the 4K Movies in a separate directory that is not shared. It is much easier to make 1080P versions of the movie in advance as Linus described and placed those in your regular Movies directory, which can be transcoded to 720P as needed or play in direct mode.

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  8. Î just use Handbrake and encode every file before moving it to my NAS(Synology DS916+). this way, there is no need for transcoding and the nas can easily stream up to 20 clients while the CPU can go on vacation.

    Just use handbrake and check on the first tab "web-optimized" and "metadata-passthrough". Thats the whole magic.

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  9. I run my plex on a Windows 10 VM. The host is a windows server 2019. I have no gpu but able to transcode 5 to 7 videos on the fly. If i have around 3 people watching with direct stream, I can have more people watching. It helps that the end user changes a few settings as the default setting is not set to watch the native source resolution. Another option that could help is that if you have tons of spare RAM, you can use RAM for transcoding instead of hardware.

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  10. @Linus, your highbitrate content definitely limits HW transcoding, for us regular guys though I have had over 21 Transcodes work with 32 total streams using iQSV on my i7 10700K. the CPU was barely sweating, using unRAID and the official Docker contain.

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  11. The GTX 1060 has a limit of 3 session (you can even see this in the Support Matrix link in the description), so did they use a custom firmware? Nvidia sets these limits because they want to sell their quadros and server cards which are mostly unrestricted but cost way more. Afaik you can have a lot more transcode sessions with newer Intel CPUs. So I would not use a dedicated graphics card for Plex transcoding. The newest Intel CPUs with P/E Cores still made some problems last time i checked, but 10* and 11* models with integrated graphics should be fine. It's also way more energy efficient.

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