Plex Server

TheCaptain53 · December 18, 2015

So my dad and I have been in discussion for a while about building a PC to act as a server for Plex. If you don't know what that is, read here: https://plex.tv/

Now that you've familiarised yourself, this is the sort of build I've come up with. http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/Q7dVxr

Before you scream the eternal, "OMG U SHUD GET INTELL INSTED CUZ IPC BETER", this was a better value prospect because of the sheer number of cores. I also won't be overclocking this puppy, hence the cheap mATX motherboard. The FX-8320 should perform well enough for at least 3 concurrent streams, which is probably more than my household will be doing, but at least it leaves room for expansion.

I'm yet to choose a video card, but Plex does not support accelerated transcoding (at least, not yet), so I will probably be picking up a SUPER cheap one that has a simple video output. If this changes in the future, I may chuck a faster one in, but not now.

For anyone running Plex, will this be enough? Too much?

As a side note, does anyone run a Live TV app or are able to integrate a PCIe TV Tuner card with the Plex application? That's something else we'd like to do with this PC, although it's not a main requirement.

Thanks in advance.

pravarth · December 18, 2015

The amount of CPU power you need will depend on whether you want to do live transcoding. But if you enable direct stream, plex will pass the video directly without transcoding. This way I have successfully run plex servers on the raspberry pi 2. All my devices (phones, TVs etc) support the popular formats so trans-coding is not really necessary in my case. If possible I would encourage you to go this route.

Anyway, it looks like you want to have the transcoding feature. In that case an 8320 should be enough for these tasks.

TheCaptain53 · December 18, 2015

The amount of CPU power you need will depend on whether you want to do live transcoding. But if you enable direct stream, plex will pass the video directly without transcoding. This way I have successfully run plex servers on the raspberry pi 2. All my devices (phones, TVs etc) support the popular formats so trans-coding is not really necessary in my case. If possible I would encourage you to go this route.

Anyway, it looks like you want to have the transcoding feature. In that case an 8320 should be enough for these tasks.

In what scenarios would you have to transcode the footage rather than pass it on straight away (besides being in the wrong format)?

pravarth · December 19, 2015

I would transcode only if the playback device does not support the source video codec. Most modern TVs and phones support h264 video, so in my case I never have to transcode. Maybe you can temporarily install plexserver on one your machines and see if your playback devices support your most used video codecs. Or I guess you can lookup codec support in the device spec page (for TVs).

TheCaptain53 · December 19, 2015

I would transcode only if the playback device does not support the source video codec. Most modern TVs and phones support h264 video, so in my case I never have to transcode. Maybe you can temporarily install plexserver on one your machines and see if your playback devices support your most used video codecs. Or I guess you can lookup codec support in the device spec page (for TVs).

I'll cover my ass either way, an FX-6300 would probably do the job.