Your’re transcoding multiple 4K streams, which strips HDR in Plex and does not tone map correctly.
Transcoding 4K not only looks awful, but it is a huge resource hog.
Stop sharing out your 4K content, only share out 1080p.
Got Ubuntu installed on the HP 590 (i3 8100, 500GB NVME). Getting plex functioning properly on Ubuntu wasn’t that hard but I still have a lot to learn about this. I’m having so many issues with my Win10 PC and sharing the drvies with my media across the network. I followed multiple guides and can’t get access on other PC’s. Probably just going to do a NAS Killer build and hopefully I’ll have more luck with FreeNAS/ZFS.
I could get 14 1080p ~10MB/s hardware transcodes to my gaming PC before maxing out on gigabit ethernet. The i3-8100 was sitting at around 40% usage. I used a sample x264 1080p 10-bit 55MB/s video as my test.
Thanks for the reply, I don’t have much of a 4k library, I mainly just wanted to see if it could be done. But if a better way of testing capacity is 1080p to 720p transcodes, I’ll try that and see what I can get to.
Thanks for the great guide.
I use 4k transcodes to test, but they are mainly just limited by the videoram which isnt really stressing the encoder. I think that I have seen reports that quicksync can handle 4 4k->1080P transcodes on the HD530 with most of the recommendations here are better than that.
lots of good info here:
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I’m looking to upgrade my current Plex server to one of the listed QuickSync options in this post (very helpful guide by the way!), and have a few questions.
I am fairly new at this, and plan on buying one of the 8th generation desktops in the recommendations, probably the i3-8100 HP Pavillion 590-p0033w. My media collection is fairly small currently (around 1.25TB, almost all 1080p content, no 4k with no plans for any) and stored on an older Western Digital external hard drive. Based on the guide, it seems like it would be worthwhile to invest in building a NAS to store my media, and using the HP Pavillion 590-p0033w solely as a server. I don’t expect my media collection to grow beyond 4TB any time in the next two years or more, so would it still make sense/be necessary for me to build a NAS in addition to the QuickSync server, or would I be better off swapping out the included HDD in the QuickSync server with a larger one with an accompanying SSD for Plex metadata and whatnot and consider building a NAS in a couple of years as I need it?
Go for the 290 instead.
The 290 looks like a better proposition for my use case, thanks for the recommendation.
Still, would I be better off building a NAS to serve the media, or would I be okay to store my library on a larger HDD in the 290 for a library of my size?
I ordered my 290 the other day and tossed around a few ideas. Ended up settling on getting a nvme m.2 1tb and plan to use a good deal of that for “new releases” on plex and have the unraid nas housing older stuff. I would think that would aid in performance for the content that will be played more.
In your case if you don’t feel you need a NAS then maybe just table that for another project down the line. I’ve tried out a good many nas solutions over the last few months and found that UNRAID was well worth the money for a basic setup. FreeNAS is a great system but I got to a point where I just wanted something that works that I don’t have to overthink. OpenMediaVault I do believe has some potential that could be further developed in the coming years.
with the media you have at that size it easily fits on a single drive. I would get the nvme module for the OS and boot and put the large HD with media in the box.
NAS is great for redundancy and expansion, but it seems like overkill for what you have.
That makes sense. I think I’ll go down that route for now, and table the NAS per @Jhunter844’s suggestion until my use case requires it. Thanks for the advice!
I was seeing some cheap HBA Fiber Channel 4 & 8-Gbps cards on ebay. I assume that is meant to setup like iSCSI or something? Not sure how Linux friendly they are for the ones I was seeing when searching for network cards.
I guess what I’m getting at is if these would be a cheaper alternative to 10Gbps setups or ultimately more complex/expensive? I was thinking of a short run between my Unraid machine to my soon to be Plex Server.
Video for inspiration…
I mean, you can have a 10Gb direct setup with 2 cards and a cable for less than $75… how cheap are we talking?
Something like this. I was seeing a lot of these cards for under 10 bucks the other day. Set up for Peer to Peer and I suppose it would be a cheap option. I think the kicker would be to find some cards that have full height and low profile options.
I have never used FC, but I am under the impression that it uses fibre channel protocol to transfer information that is largely used for storage networks, like a storage controller to a storage server. They do not use the Ethernet protocol, so no IP addresses. I really don’t think it would work at all.
I went with 40G QSFP cards with SFP+ adapters, because it was the best bang for the buck a year ago, but if I were to do it today I would probably just get two of these nics ($35 each): Mellanox MCX311A-XCAT CX311A ConnectX-3 EN 10G Ethernet 10GbE SFP+ PCI-E NIC | eBay
plus two cheap SR optical LC-LC tranceivers like these ($7 each): Genuine Cisco SFP-10G-SR V03 Transceiver Module 10-2415-03 Grade A. | eBay
And a OM4 optical LC-LC patch cable ($4.90) like this to connect them together: LC-LC OM4 Multimode Fiber Patch Cable Duplex 2m - FS
I am also running a switch that has four SFP+ ports so I connect my 10G machines (UNRAID, PLEX Server, workstation) to it directly through the fiber I have described above.
Hope this helps,
Yeah I wasn’t sure how it worked. That’s outside of anything I’ve ever messed with but would be neat to get into. Looks like there is a FC over IP protocol but yeah maybe not mess with it.
So maybe someone can give their input on this. I encountered a NFS problem…“Stale File Handle” which from googling basically means that the NFS server changed and I gather wasn’t reflected on the client end so it borked it. I ended up doing a sudo umount -f /plexmedia and then sudo mount -a which took care of the problem.
Is there some ways to prevent that from happening? All I did was tidy up the server share by deleting some stuff.
this is one option you can use to avoid this issue:
ok, I’m coming from a windows environment, so please forgive the lack of knowledge
I understand the setup of ubuntu and the plex setup, but the way I have my setup is 2 separate NAS boxes, and this will replace my primary PMS/transcoder box
Why am I setting up Unraid? is it to facilitate the remote connections?
Unraid is the OS that a large majority of the people around here use for their storage servers. If you already have another OS on your NAS, you should be able to keep using it, you’ll just need to figure out how to export the media via NFS. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can make a separate post in #technology:tech-support or ask for help in the Discord tech support channel. Once you have the media shared via NFS, you can use the remainder of the guide above to set up Plex on the dedicated box.
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thank you so much for the quick reply.
the 2 NAS’ will be readybuilt appliances (sacrilege , I know), but per the documentation do support NFS
so I would set them up to share via nfs, and then use the rest of the guide to mount them so PMS on Ubuntu can see them and I’m good to go. yes?