my h265 is working great on my i7-7700. Except that’s on emby not plex.
It works fine on Plex as well.
I followed your ebay search links and there are a bunch of relatively cheap desktops that I have a question about. A lot of them have “SFF” in the model for example:
HP ProDesk 400 G4 SFF 3.9Ghz Intel Core i3-7100
Just wanted to confirm the SFF didn’t have anything to do with the CPU model as you say to avoid “F” series processors?
SFF stands for “Small form factor” in this case.
Ah ok that makes sense. Thank you!
I’m currently running the HP290 with the Celeron G4900 and some upgraded ram. but i also have a Intel Nuc with a i3-10110U and im wondering if i should swap the hp290 out with the nuc as my plex server but have been having a hard time finding good comparisons i know the g4900 has a much higher power limit and wonder if that helps its transcoding much
I want to say thank you for this guide. This helped me finally transition from a late 2014 Mac mini to a proper 9th gen Intel prebuilt (HP ProDesk 400 G5 Desktop Mini i5-9500T 8GB DDR4, with an added 512 GB NVME).
I am also a Linux noob (but I’ve been running UnRaid for 3 years on a separate box from another guide here, thanks for that!), but the step by step guides and troubleshooting here definitely helped me get setup with everything. Poking around the forums and internet also helped me move the values from the MacOS plist file into Preferences.xml
I would add in my 2 cents here: if you are running this headless (like I am), make sure to have a way to SSH into it or use a Remote Desktop viewer (I’m lazy and use AnyDesk), or you will be plugging in a monitor, mouse and keyboard to troubleshoot it (if trouble ever arises)
2 Likes
Hello, thanks for your guide. I got an Intel Core i5-10400 with motherboard. Would Plex also run with this ?
Greetings
Yes, it would!
1 Like
A couple of years ago I found on this site and built a Plex server on a hp290. This pc continues to serve me well, so I am coming here for some advice. We just bought a second property that is serviced with 500 mbps fiber and I need to configure a pfsense box and a proxmox server to run home assistant vm and a few dockers. Please note I do not want to run pfsense as a VM, as I like pfsense on its own box.
I have no problem buying used hardware and see that hp EliteDesk/Prodesk/Optiplex/Lenovo boxes with i5-6600t to 8400t in the $100 to $150 price range.
Should I convert my hp290 to a pfsense build for the second property and upgrade my Plex server?
What is the current budget king for either of these builds? Since all these boxes are on 24/7 I would like to consider power consumption.
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Honestly, I think that the HP290 that you own remains the highest value for any of these. Newer mini pc’s with 2.5gbe or other economical power savings are still $100+ (look at the N100 boxes). The power saving of those compared to the already owned HP290 have a trade off so far in the future it isn’t worth it tbh.
Stumbled on this guide, very informative. I just upgraded my setup recently to a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro + HP Elitedesk 800 G4 clustered in VMware ESXi. both are i5 8500t + 24GB memory.
I run Emby, not Plex. I configured my Emby VM (windows 10) to run on one of my nodes with GPU passthrough. tested and confirmed quicksync is recognized by emby and works for hardware transcoding, but i did notice that 1 hardware transcode had quicksync at almost 90%. adding a 2nd put it at 99% and a 3rd + would cause freezes and stutters. these were 1080p transcodes.
Any thoughts? according to the guide, i should be able to have at least 15+ transcodes.
Provisioned VM with 4 vCPU, 4GB memory, GPU pass through and it runs on a local NVMe drive since DRS wont work with hardware passthrough.
Have you tested Plex? There’s a reason most of us use it instead of Emby.
Tried Plex a few years ago alongside Emby before committing on Emby for various reasons, one of them being live tv.
When was reading the guide and saw the 2 transcode limitation on windows, I thought that was Quicksync related prompting my post, then re-read and saw it was plex related.
Anyway, I did some testing today, I think it was my own foul up under provisioning the VM. I bumped up memory to the VM to allow 4GB allocated to the iGPU and pushed 7 1080p 8mpbs transcodes each ~60FPS without issue. I transitioned off of a Quadro P600 so didnt consider the shared system memory when migrating 
The 2 transcode limit has nothing to do with Windows, Plex, or QSV. It was an Nvidia issue at the time.
1 Like
Hi JDM_WAAAT
First thanks for this nice discussion about plex transcoding.
I’m looking for such functionality for my personal usage only (few transcode in parallel I guess 5 to 10 max).
I have NAS server so I’m looking only for transcoding. I would like to keep it quite simple and small (like mini of micro desktop).
My first coice would be:
-
List item Fujitsu Q957 - Windows 11 Pro - Pentium G4560 (3,5 GHz) - 8 Go de RAM - 240 Go SSD
-
List item Fujitsu Esprimo Q957 Intel CPU i3-7100T 8GB DDR4 128GB M.2 SSD USB3.0 Usb-C
-
List item # Ordinateur PC HP 290 G1 MT Business, I3-7100, 1 To, 8 Go, Wifi, Windows 10, )
-
List item # Ordinateur HP 290 G1 - I5-7500T/8Go/SSD+HDD
Of course I know what your favorite
My favorite woul be the 2nd in the list with a new SSD.
Waitng for you point of view .
Thanks
1 Like
Followed this guide back a while again…
Looking to upgrade my plex box, what would be the best machine to get now?
Something like the HP Slim Desktop S01-pF2145xt?
What do you have now?
running plex in a Proxmox LXC that is running an Intel(R) Core™ i7-7700
Certainly not the recommended method but if it has QS via igpu pass through it might be at least fine.
Can take your pick, otherwise, of almost any Intel based system 7th gen CPU or newer that has the igpu. Unless you have unusual specified codec needs, they’ll all perform about the same. We see convenient SFF priced around 60-80 dollars and up.