Plex Media Server With Ryzen APU

[Rowey]

Im in the Process of Seting up a home server and was looking in to Plex for all my media would a 2400g be fine for this or do i need to be going the intel route ?

[Velcade]

[TetraSky]

It will be fine, unless there's some sort of random issue with Ryzen APUs for some unknown reason, there's literally no reason why it shouldn't work.
Plex literally runs without any problem on my old amd turion based laptop after all.

[Dedayog]

Just now, TetraSky said:

It will be fine, unless there's some sort of random issue for some unknown reason, there's literally no reason why it shouldn't work.
Plex literally runs without any problem on my old amd turion based laptop.

Plex has such a small footprint, it's almost silly.  I game and run Plex on the same machine in my sig and I don't even see a frame rate drop when starting a movie up.

 

I heart Plex.  Lots.

[TetraSky]

4 minutes ago, jstudrawa said:

I heart Plex.  Lots.

I personally heart Universal Media Server a bit more, since it's free and open source and worked nicely with my old PS3 when Plex bugged up for some reason. But I do have both UMS and Plex installed and change between the two depending on the device I stream to. Some have less difficulties to pick up Plex while others simply don't see it at all on the network...

[paddy-stone]

Depends on if you want it to transcode or not, if you don't need transcoding ie the devices you PLAY the media on support the formats/codecs and resolutions of the media you have natively... then it's just streaming, not transcoding. Transcoding introduces many variables, and with a passmark of 17000 being the recommendation for 4K 10 bit HDR to transcode to 1080p 10mbps, that is a tall order. IMO IF you think you might want to have media be available at 1080p that you have in 4k, you'd be better off re-coding the 4k media so you have a 4k copy and a 1080p copy if using plex.

My alternative is to use plex up until the point where it struggles with transcoding, and if that happens, switch to using KODI for those files that have trouble transcoding. This way you don't need multiple copies, and KODI will pretty much just play anything without the massive overheads that transcoding in plex requires... well that's my experience of it anyway. Of course this depends on WHERE you're playing your media too, if at home then should be no problem with my solution. If out of the home, it will depend on your upload speed at home (server location), and your data speed to the device you're using... and if you can access your server outside the home. But there are a few ways to do that, and many guides on the internet to help in that regard. so it all really comes down to how you would rather do the above, and whether you'd rather have an overpowered server just to transcode media, have multiple copies so as not to need transcoding at least on the extreme cases like 4k HDR etc, or my way where you utilize plex up to a point.

The above is just my opinion, and based off my own experiences of using plex... and I do like plex and use it every day, I'm just saying in certain cases it's just easier to say f and pay respects and then use KODI. I have done this a few times where plex wouldn't cope even on my Ryzen 1700 (as the server) and playing to my nvidia shield... in the end I got tired of trying different things and just used KODI for that one movie here and there.

[Salv8 (sam)]

1 hour ago, TetraSky said:

It will be fine, unless there's some sort of random issue with Ryzen APUs for some unknown reason, there's literally no reason why it shouldn't work.
Plex literally runs without any problem on my old amd turion based laptop after all.

i have had weird ass issues with APU's with server software (plex is an example) in the past, i think it's how it's been intrgreated.

plex does support GPU transcoding and it may have activated it itself, needless to say if you are getting worse performance then you expected then check and see if it's been enabled, APU graphic processes aren't designed for that workload and act weird when trying to process it

i remember running a dual core AMD fx APU with plex and plex acted strangely, sometimes it failed to buffer locally while accessing it remotely worked without issue. some plugins didn't want to work at all, some did work, reinstalling both software and OS didn't help and still had the same issues, updated both plex and the plugins as well to the same effect.

just be careful man, it can be very...interesting....

[DezGalbie]

6 hours ago, Rowey said:

Im in the Process of Seting up a home server and was looking in to Plex for all my media would a 2400g be fine for this or do i need to be going the intel route ?

I have the 2200G in my Plex server ATM. It works fine. I can have multiple 1080p transcoded streams going at once with no issue.

I do suspect that it would maybe be different with 4K transcoding though. 4K seems to use a lot of horsepower. I don't do any 4K stuff yet so I'm not 100% sure about that.

[Thirdgen89GTA]

17 hours ago, Velcade said:

I would have to disagree with that list.

 

The 2400g might be able to handle a single 4k HDR transcode, but it would be borderline. A Ryzen 2600 would definitely handle it no problems, probably 2 of them at the same time with a little CPU left over.

 

My 4790k can handle a 4K HDR transcode in my FreeNAS server.  It takes a moment or two longer to start a 4K HDR transcode vs a 1080p, but ultimately it has no problems transcoding faster than real time.  It typically hovers in the 1.5x to 1.7x speed for transcoding.

 

My settings are "Make my CPU Hurt" for quality, and buffer 240 seconds.  So builds up a 4m buffer.  If I set it to low quality fast transcodes, it can break 2x speed so it theoretically could handle two 4K Transcodes at once.

 

And this is an old i7-4790k cpu with 32GB of DDR3 running FreeNAS 11.2.

 

I've even gone as far as to play every StarWars movie at once.   My 4790k has a passmark of 12000 or so when I last ran the suite.  An i5-8400 is about the same passmark score.  and a Ryzen 2600 is about 14000.  I just built my nephew a gaming PC and the Ryzen 2600 was a no brainer when it came to bang for the buck.

 

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

And details for the file.  Its a 4k HDR file direct from the Blu-Ray.

[Velcade]

9 hours ago, Thirdgen89GTA said:

I would have to disagree with that list.

Take it up with Plex, it's their recommendation. 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

4 hours ago, Velcade said:

Take it up with Plex, it's there recommendation. 

I realize its Plex's list, I was pointing out that it's overblown.

 

Here's two transcodes.  A 4K HDR to SDR 1080p 10Mbits, and a 1080p SDR to 1080p 10mbits.  Both video's played without buffering for about 10 minutes while I made some dinner.  I had a 3rd 1080p movie transcoding, but that did cause buffering.  Killed the 3rd 1080p movie, and buffering went away.

 

Companies will post things to cover their own butt.  In the absence of real world experience its fine to go with that but in most cases you'll spend more money. I realize that yes, I don't have that many posts here, but I've been up front, Tautulli shows the transcoding speeds and its above 1.0x speed even with both movies transcoding. 

 

If you visit the Plex forums or FreeNAS forums you'll see all sorts of builds that don't match up with Plex's official guidelines.