CPU for Plex Media Server? (4k transcoding)

[Avalon]

What is tautulli scripting ??
How much does *your* cloud storage cost ??(pittance?) I would suspect many people would worry about leaving their stuff online , and many would not have access to a fast cheap symetrical connection.
I like hevc but its a v. very heavy to encode and quite cpu horespower to play back, unless the playback is hardware assisted.
In the end disks are relativeley cheap and h264 is well understood and very well supported in hardware of all stripes.

£7.82/m for unlimited storage, I paid £1.20/m for a suitable VPS for 12 months with 400/400Mbit (though in fairness I’m paying £24/m for the last 6 of the contract so average £8.80/m), you can get a 1230v2/8GB/2x1TB with symmetrical gigabit for £15 or Hetzner Cloud do shared 10Gbit VPS’ for next to nothing. Cloud+VPS costs less than leaving one of my local servers on 24/7 at home, let alone buying one, or the drives that populate it, or dealing with backups/failed hardware. As to people who dismiss the cloud, encryption is a thing and we have zero documented cases of anyone who didn’t do anything monumentally stupid (like publicly share a link or buying a shady edu account) having content removed or accounts closed.

H264 is widely supported, HEVC is more bandwidth/storage friendly, depending on scale/usage, one (usually) is more important than the other. For me, I know each of my users personally, we’re either directly related or have been friends for decades, I also know what devices they run, as invariably it’s me who’s told them what to buy. I have a M2000, but in all honesty a modern intel iGPU is the cheapest option for encoding work, most of the negativity stems from Sandy/Ivy iGPU’s which were not that great.

 

[GWANGY]

Thank you for sharing some solid facts and figures.
M2000 gfx card?
I keep all my stuff in-house in 1080p or less .. with the very odd exception ..I encode everything in h264 .12tb , 50% full , will do for 2++ years
I tried h265 but the increased coding times (x5+) were untenable. .
And it was not supported on the existing playback devices.
Sadly I have no access to fibre , let alone 300/300

 

[Avalon]

Not sure if I explained this clearly, you don’t need a fast connection at home, the cheap VPS with a fast connection deals with putting content on the cloud storage at full speed and pulls it to stream to your devices. Your connection just needs to be fast enough to stream your content, generally that’s not going to be beyond the majority of UK connections unless you like very high bit-rate/remux rips. You could run a local server without the storage side, if you do a lot of transcoding that can work, though obviously you still have the power costs.

An M2000 is the Maxwell Quadro equivalent of the Nvidia 960 in the same way the Pascal P2000 is the 1060, the x60 versions tend to get the later NVEnc hardware and Quadro’s have no artificial restriction on transcode sessions (VRAM limits sessions). Consumer GPU’s are limited to two transcodes, you can remove the restriction with a standard card and a modified driver, a nice handy matrix exists with the number of transcodes each card can handle at a given source/output.

Also I missed your Tautulli question previously, it’s a plug-in for Plex that is invaluable in providing data and management info on plays, clients, transcoding etc. Recent updates have improved Plex in this respect, but Tautulli is better, it can also be configured using scripts to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, for example prevent transcoding in your 4K library, so people who can’t direct play it, don’t grind your server into the ground and everyone suffers.