Xeon e5-1620v3

[SweetAndLow]

I have a E5-1620v3 and use plex. 4k with plex is a beast and I don't think you are going to have a good experience trying to transcode it. When I do a direct play my 4k content is over 100mbps which most client devices struggle to deal with. I use firetv's and those are all wifi so wifi is my bottleneck. If you use Ethernet connection for your clients you will probably be ok. For transcoding I could never get plex to play nice and this was because of CPU performance combined with HDR. I think once plex get's it's act together the CPU will do ok but it's right at the limit.

 

[Yorick]

Interesting. I just tried that again. iOS Plex goes between playing and buffering for a few minutes, then settles down. When iOS is buffering, Plex transcode shows it's throttled - doesn't need all CPU. Maybe the Plex app needs to request a smaller stream on a 4k transcode.

And yes a single 4k stream takes all of my CPU, or nearly as, on transcode. It'd make sense to save a smaller version of that file via handbrake, if streaming to mobile was something I wanted to do a lot of. I've only ever done it for testing purposes. The HDR to SDR transcode that Plex does isn't great, so there's a quality benefit of using handbrake until / unless Plex gets better at HDR to SDR.

I hear you on WiFi vs wired. Everything that "matters" in my home is wired 1G - Roku, TV, PCs, FreeNAS, game consoles. WiFi is for IoT and mobile devices only. I wouldn't want to shunt a 4k stream over WiFi unless the WiFi client has some serious oomph - multiple streams, supports 40Mhz minimum. WiFi 6 might improve things in that regard when it becomes widespread.

 

[julong]

Would a Xeon e5-2650v3 be able to handle 4k transcoding? And h.265 transcoding?

 

[Yorick]

With a pass mark of just shy of 15k I’d expect so - but wouldn’t it make sense to frontload the computation, trade a bit of space and handbrake those kind of files ahead of time?

 

[julong]

With a pass mark of just shy of 15k I’d expect so - but wouldn’t it make sense to frontload the computation, trade a bit of space and handbrake those kind of files ahead of time?

I have handbrake but don't get how to use it. Can anyone explain?

 

[Yorick]

https://appfurnace.zendesk.com/hc/e...6-Converting-Videos-for-Mobile-with-Handbrake

 

[julong]

Perhaps not the right forums and I apologise in advance if not allowed. Can anyone make sure I'm reading this correctly from Plex website?

Hardware-Accelerated Streaming on Linux requires:

• 64-bit Ubuntu (16.04 or later) or 64-bit Fedora (26 or later) distributions. (Other distributions may be capable, but are not officially supported.)

If your Linux computer also has a dedicated graphics card, the video encoding acceleration of Intel Quick Sync Video may become unavailable when the GPU is in use. If your computer has an NVIDIA GPU, please install the latest Latest NVIDIA drivers for Linux to make sure that Plex can use your NVIDIA graphics card for video encoding (only) when Intel Quick Sync Video becomes unavailable.

So if I were to use Linux as my OS for my server which also to my understanding uses zfs for raid. Would allow me to use a gpu to help transcode videos using Plex.

 

[Heracles]

Hey julong,

Linux does not use ZFS for raid by default. ZFS for Linux exists, but the typical raid config you do with mdadm are not ZFS-based...

 

[julong]

Hey julong,

Linux does not use ZFS for raid by default. ZFS for Linux exists, but the typical raid config you do with mdadm are not ZFS-based...

Ah my friend who is great with Linux said that it does so I might have miss heard.it is not easy to use zfs with Linux? Also did I read the other part about the you right

 

[Heracles]

Hi again Julong,

I did not said that it was hard. I just said that it is not default... Here, my ZFS solution is FreeNAS. I did a few raid in Linux, but again, these are not ZFS.

ZFS is a kind of all-in-one. It will manage the block devices and the filesystem at once. The default, typical raid solution for Linux is mdadm. That tool will take a few block devices and emulate a new, bigger block device, with built-in redundancy if you configured it for that. Once that virtual block device is created, you need to format it with a completely different tool. To mimic ZFS, you would format it as an LVM. Once LVM did its job, you then create and format the partitions with something like EXT4.

So you end up with :
Tool No 1 : mdadm creating a virtual block device
Tool No 2 ; LVM allowing you to create and resize partitions, like ZFS does with its datasets
Tool No 3 : Ext4 as a filesystem to host and handle the files themselves

ZFS does all of that by itself, in a single technology.

So No, the default raid for Linux is not ZFS. Again, ZFS for Linux exists and I do not know how easy it is to use or not. All I know is that it is not default.

 

[Yorick]

“If your Linux computer also has a dedicated graphics card”

Emphasis theirs. “Also”, and they are at pains to italicize it. I’d read that as “this won’t work with just NVIDIA and no Intel built-in GPU”. You might want the Plex forum to clarify that.

This does seem like an outsized effort for streaming the odd 4K file to mobile, when you can front-load the computation instead, or you could go with an x11ssh-f and an e3-1225v6. With memory, that’s about 600 bucks.

That said, the whole idea of storing a Blu-ray collection digitally is a hobby, and building a Linux computer to do it, with everything that entails configuration-wise, is definitely within the bounds of that hobby.