Tag: transcoding

Sharing is caring with plex server

My current plex stats over 90days
The last 90 days on my plex server

I always expected an increase in my plex server usage from my friends as the UK enter the Covid-19 lockdown. Especially when I heard all the streaming services dropping back to SD  To be fair its not been as big a demand as I expected but its noticeable compared to last few months of 2019.

Most popular clients

The most popular clients seem to be Chrome & Chromecasts (not sure if Chromecasts sometimes report themselves as Chrome). Thankfully the Xbox has dropped because that client requires everything to be transcoded unlike Tizen which will happily if theres enough bandwidth send the original file and not require any transcoding.

plex concurrent users

I have however hit 3 concurrent streams again, keeping an eye out to see if I can hit 4 or even more. No idea what it would do to my AMD based Plex server? I do have the Intel Xeon based HP Z800 which I recently bought a Nvida Quadro K620 GPU hoping to get hardware accelerated streaming finally working on the HP Z800.

Thats a task for Easter maybe…

Update 13/4/2020

4 concurrent users finally

I noticed my plex server finally reached the 4 concurrent users over the last weekend.

Hardware-Accelerated Plex media server on Ubuntu?

Plex logoI have been using Plex media server on my AMD six core machine for a while and its good but cooling is a issue. About 9 months ago I installed a Nvidia graphics card hoping to take advantage of the new hardware acceleration option. However I realised its a non-starter as it required a Intel chipset not AMD.

Then over the last few months I got my hands on a secondhand HP Z800 workstation with 4x quad core 2.8 ghz processors (yes 16 cores in total). It came with 12 gig of memory which I was planning to upgrade if things work out. It came with a PCI-Express Nvida Geforce graphics card, so I was thinking everything is set. just install Ubuntu with Plex media server, install the proprietary Nvidia display drivers and sit back and enjoy?

I wish…

Here is Plex transcoding inception from 1080p with DTS (Blu-ray sourced) to something suitable for my Pixel 4 (I had to turn off play original, to force it to do the transcoding)transcoding with htop

You can see it much clearer in the htop terminal. Look at those cores running transcoding tasks.

Plex with transcoding

Here is Plex not transcoding inception from 1080p with DTS (Blu-ray sourced) to my Pixel 4

not transcoding with Htop

Quite different from the above, the machines is hardly doing anything over its 16 cores. But the bandwidth is a problem outside a local network environment

Plex not transcoding

If anyone has successfully got hardware-Accelerated Streaming working on a Ubuntu server, let me know!