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[someonewhoisonthisforum]

Hi all,

 

My parents had an old PC lying around which they weren't using. For the past few months, I have been using it to experiment with Plex at home, streaming movies and videos off of it. Buffer is ok through most videos, but skipping between parts of films can cause long load times. I have decided that I would like to purchase a lifetime subscription as it has worked so well, but I am worried that now I will be able to stream my home movies for example (1080p) at full resolution, the buffering will become a problem? The specs of the system is an i5-760, 4gb Ram, and a Radeon hd4350. For storage I have 3 250gb SSDs (All of which came from some old laptops) which hold everything on the system inclusive of movies, and a 1tb 7200rpm HDD which currently isn't being used, although I don't think it would be very reliable either. I was wondering what your thoughts would be if the buffering could get worse, and possibly settings to play around with or fairly inexpensive upgrades I could do to the system to help with the problem? Thanks all for your help.

 

Note: I am already looking into a small ram upgrade possibly to 8gb as I think anymore would be pretty overkill with the current system, and from research my understanding is that it won't have a big impact on Plex performance

[Jarsky]

Plex isn't very ram intensive, but it does love CPU. For any transcoding you might be doing as well as things such as metadata scraping, intro detection, etc...running in the background. 

 

If your equipment and file format is supported for Direct Stream then theres very little resource, though audio is still processed by the CPU.  

 

A Plex lifetime pass is about $100...you might be better putting that money towards a platform upgrade ideally something 7th gen or newer. 

There have been massive improvements in IPC since those 1st gen Core CPU's, and 7th gen+ have excellent Intel HD graphics for QuickSync encoding if you do get a pass later for hardware transcoding. 

You also might like to check out Emby or Jellyfin before commiting to Plex Pass. While I run Plex, I personally find Emby runs better for me. 

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, someonewhoisonthisforum said:

Hi all,

 

My parents had an old PC lying around which they weren't using. For the past few months, I have been using it to experiment with Plex at home, streaming movies and videos off of it. Buffer is ok through most videos, but skipping between parts of films can cause long load times. I have decided that I would like to purchase a lifetime subscription as it has worked so well, but I am worried that now I will be able to stream my home movies for example (1080p) at full resolution, the buffering will become a problem? The specs of the system is an i5-760, 4gb Ram, and a Radeon hd4350. For storage I have 3 250gb SSDs (All of which came from some old laptops) which hold everything on the system inclusive of movies, and a 1tb 7200rpm HDD which currently isn't being used, although I don't think it would be very reliable either. I was wondering what your thoughts would be if the buffering could get worse, and possibly settings to play around with or fairly inexpensive upgrades I could do to the system to help with the problem? Thanks all for your help.

 

Note: I am already looking into a small ram upgrade possibly to 8gb as I think anymore would be pretty overkill with the current system, and from research my understanding is that it won't have a big impact on Plex performance

You don’t need to pay for Plex unless you have an actual use case for the pay walled features. I am a rather advanced Plex user, and I don’t have Plex pass… the free version does everything 98% of people need. 
 

As far as buffering, that will only be an issue if your not direct playing. You ideally want to not transcode and only direct play. If you do this, your current system will be plenty fast enough. You don’t need SSD’s at all…. So going forward in order to get more space for less money, just use harddrives. Videos are on the order of 50 MB/s for a full 4k blue ray, harddrives can easily do 3x that speed; 1080p is even less, much less….

 

The issue is transcoding. If you need to transcode, it’s going to hit your CPU (or supported GPU) hard. The post above details this well. 

[LIGISTX]

Oh, I should add. My previous homelab ran Plex in an Ubuntu VM. I have that VM 2 GB of RAM and 2 threads of my i3 6100… and it has no issues serving you multiple transcoded 1080p videos, and direct play used les then 2-3% CPU usage. So Plex doesn’t need much… but an i5 760 is pretty dang slow these days, it will struggle at transcoding in real time. 

[tikker]

Seconding what the others say about Direct Play. If you see buffering often or regularly Plex is probably transcoding. You can check this on the dashboard. To avoid that, you are best off storing your content in a container, audio and video format that the device being streamed to understands, so that no transcoding at all is necessary (Direct Play) or at most a change of container (Direct Stream). It offers an 'optimise' feature that you could try. My Plex server runs on my old i5 4690k. It can handle some 1080p transcodes (max I've tried was 2), but don't ask it to transcode 4k stuff. Direct Play on the other hand is like 3% CPU usage and no buffering.