Help with Building a Plex Box

[Dee Syphur]

Hey y'all!

 

So I recently decided that I want to finally backup all of my DVDs and Blu-Rays and make a Plex server for my house.

 

I have built and set up close to a dozen computers for myself, friends, and family, but never a server. They've primarily been gaming/casual usage cases so that's kind of all I know.

 

I am hoping to get some advice for building a small server pc to just stream within my house. At most there will be 4 simultaneous streams with a more realistic usage case of 2 streams at once. What are good processors for my scenario and would I need a GPU for encoding? And are there any other components that are essential for running a server?

 

Thank you in advance!

[Lurick]

Do you have a general budget in mind to avoid going over for this? I believe Plex supports GPU encoding to some extent but I haven't really looked at it to be honest. If you're talking a couple 1080p transcodes at a time then there is a wide range of processors out there which you could use. I think the general rule of thumb is to have a passmark score of around 1500 per 1080p transcode. You can easily find the passmark score of a CPU by just googling "x passmark score". You don't need ECC memory or anything crazy, just a stable ethernet connection to the box and a good enough CPU. I would say 8GB of memory is more than enough and you could probably get away with less.

[Dee Syphur]

Budget is <$1,000. Unsure if that's an overkill budget for this or not tbh.

 

Also I was reading the Plex help page for this as well. Can I get an ELI5 for what transcoding is?

[Kered124]

3 hours ago, Dee Syphur said:

Can I get an ELI5 for what transcoding is?

Transcoding (in our application) is the process of taking a video file and transforming that file to different resolutions and quality levels (colors etc) to make it more playable on certain devices. A common use case is to transcode a 1080p 20mbps file down to 1080p 8mbps to make it play better on a poor connection external to your network. Other things that are related are audio transcoding. An example would be going from 7.1 surround sound capable file to 2.1 for a common soundbar + subwoofer setup. Subtitle burn-in is also related, as I believe it re-encodes the video with the subtitles burned into the image for a cleaner look during playback.

 

For optimal playback with Plex, direct play everything you can. If you want to watch 4k movies that are HDR, make sure your playback device and TV support 4k HDR. 1080p transcoding isn't as difficult and most computers can do it fairly easily. Intel processors with the quicksync feature perform very well when transcoding plex content.

[THEGURUOFNOTHING]

It doesn't have to be crazy fast. I have an older Dell that is dual core and has no GPU that will do dual 1080 streams. It's pushing it pretty hard but it's stable. If you've built gaming systems, this is not a big deal. Unless you are pushing 4k streams that are forced to transcode, it doesn't take much.

[Donut417]

7 hours ago, Dee Syphur said:

Hey y'all!

 

So I recently decided that I want to finally backup all of my DVDs and Blu-Rays and make a Plex server for my house.

 

I have built and set up close to a dozen computers for myself, friends, and family, but never a server. They've primarily been gaming/casual usage cases so that's kind of all I know.

 

I am hoping to get some advice for building a small server pc to just stream within my house. At most there will be 4 simultaneous streams with a more realistic usage case of 2 streams at once. What are good processors for my scenario and would I need a GPU for encoding? And are there any other components that are essential for running a server?

 

Thank you in advance!

Biggest thing to worry about is if your going to be transcoding. Lower res content like 1080p and lower is not as demanding. But 4K can make your hardware cry. Its actually suggested on the 4K Plex thread in the Plex Fourms that you DONT transcode 4K content. 

 

Im able to do software based transcoding for up to 2 1080p streams at a time with an i5 3570K. Thats a pretty old chip at this point. Hardware based transcoding requires a 4th gen Intel CPU on up or Nvida GPU (Newer ish from what I remember) and the Plex pass (was $119 lifetime licsense when I bought it). 

[thunder9231]

Most of the time, you'll probably be direct playing (no transcoding) your media files. The times that you probably will be transcoding is if the device your playing your media files on is one that doesn't support a codec that the media files are encoded as when your ripping your DVDs & Blu-Rays. Or when you are remote streaming. Or when you want to upscale  (720p to 1080p and etc) or downscale (1080p to 720p and etc). 

If you search on Youtube Byte My Bits, (if not allow to mention another channel, please remove), you will find him doing a ton of Plex server videos. It's how I learned most of Plex when I first got started.

[Salacious B Crum]

 

On 11/30/2019 at 4:04 PM, Dee Syphur said:

Hey y'all!

 

So I recently decided that I want to finally backup all of my DVDs and Blu-Rays and make a Plex server for my house.

 

I have built and set up close to a dozen computers for myself, friends, and family, but never a server. They've primarily been gaming/casual usage cases so that's kind of all I know.

 

I am hoping to get some advice for building a small server pc to just stream within my house. At most there will be 4 simultaneous streams with a more realistic usage case of 2 streams at once. What are good processors for my scenario and would I need a GPU for encoding? And are there any other components that are essential for running a server?

 

Thank you in advance!

If you are working on the cheap look for a 5 year old prebuilt pc with an I5 or I7 and stuff it with drives to your liking install unRAID and you will have a great little home NAS/media server for your entire home network, see the specs below in my sig for my primary unRAID server it is built on my old prebuilt I7 6700 I can get around 8 streams depending on the file type and trans-code requirements mostly direct stream which puts very little stress on the cpu I also run 20+ plus dockers without issue