Plex server questions

[PartyWire]

Hej, so recently I've been thinking about setting up a server for Plex and small home projects.

I have an old PC laying around with an fx-6300, 24gb ram, GTX 550ti. I have a rx-480 mining edition laying around, I was wondering if it is possible to use it for encoding?

 

I already have a small library of movies and series that I carry with me when I'm at work so I thought I'd share it with my friend group because Netflix is rolling out the annoying owners household only thing to my country.

[m9x3mos]

Those cards won't work with hardware transcoding. 

The amd card might but that is something you would need to test or the cpu would need to do it. 

Are you planning to stream outside of your home? If not, your van use direct play and not need the gpu at all for transcoding. 

[Jarsky]

It should work just fine. Keep in mind you only really need power for if you're transcoding. If you're playing native (e.g Direct Stream or Direct Play) then it uses very little overhead. 

 

The old bulldozer CPU's should be fine, and thats plenty of Ram. Plex on its own isnt Ram intensive.

As for the GPU's, keep in mind with Plex that there would be a cost to using Hardware Acceleration as you need Plex Pass. 

Free alternative would be JellyFin. 

 

It used to be that you could only use AMD cards on Windows, but these days there is support for them on both Windows and Linux for transcoding. 

The RX400 series uses UVD6 which supports HEVC / H.265 and VP9 so it should be a decent card for transcoding. 

 

The GTX550Ti is a 2011 card... it wont support H.265 so you're best to either stick with the AMD card, or Software Transcoding (CPU).