PLEX NAS - How Much Power Does Transcoding REALLY Use?

[@Yandarval]

In other words. If you are buying an off the self NAS, make sure it has QuickSync.

[@JFlogerzi]

Off the self = yuck. QuickSync is great though!

[@yensteel]

The Synology 923+ lacks it, which put a lot of people off. But the upgrade bay is nice.

[@davelamont]

Because of Robbie, I bought the Qnap TVS874 with core I5 12th Gen. I don't have the bandwidth on my Internet connection for the amount of streams of 4K it can handle. It's a beast! 8 bays of 12 TB drives in raid 6. Totally overkill. Absolutely love it.

[@nascompares]

I'm sorry...I think...I'm not sure. Just playing it safe. Sorry man / Glad to hear it / Happy Birthday.

[@leonidiakovlev]

Saving money installing CPUs into NASes without integrated graphics is the evil itself to begin with.

[@nascompares]

This is a dank comment...I LOVE IT

[@LantosAhim]

Exactly the comparison I needed. Thanks!

[@nascompares]

Cheers for the good vibes

[@Alex_Railnolds]

It would be nice to do a similar test for Jellyfin.

[@awesomearizona-dino]

excellent comparo for those that need it, my new 12600k can throttle DOWN far better than my old 2500k. ALSO built in Intel 770 graphics is a transcode monster.

[@KcajOfAllTrades]

Just hitting play now. I am hoping to run multiple 4k high bitrate streams.. Maybe about 20-30 at a time. Went for the Nvidia 4060 low profile for my 2U SFF rack PC. I'm at less than 1 minute in and already learning more 😂 Love your work man. 👍

[@nascompares]

Thanks man. Side note, your username is very fun to say. I have said it quietly whilst reading the comments 3 times and I think the person at the coffee table next to me thinks I'm summoning beetlejuice or something. Have a great weekend.

[@KcajOfAllTrades]

@@nascompares haha that's awesome man! It's actually my name. Not the smartest of moves, but I created it for personal use back when online security wasn't as big of a thing. Wishing you all a fantastic morning, thanks for always going above and beyond in your content. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, BEETLEJUICE! 😂 Looking forward to the new movie, hoping does the original justice. 👋 for now.

[@Hansen999]

@@KcajOfAllTrades You can change your display name under your profile. I made same mistake😅

[@KcajOfAllTrades]

@@Hansen999 thank you! Got that all sorted... 10 years later, but better late than never 😂

[@sigcrazy7]

I've decided to go with a more powerful NAS so it can virtualize and excel at other business tasks, but move my Plex workload to a N100 based NUC for $180, while hosting the data on the NAS. The mini-PC, even a N100 based one, doubles the performance of any NAS with an iGPU, and also removes that consideration from my decision when purchasing a NAS. My Plex performance is fantastic whether the data resides on a DS1621+ or on a RealTek based DS418. As for power, the Bee Mini S mini PC uses 6w while idle. As an added bonus, I can still run a second Plex server on the NAS as a backup, albeit less capable, server.

[@mauricechong809]

The main problem I got with transcoding is how much you need to wait for playback to start. It can take 2 seconds for a video to start streaming with no transcoding and take 10 seconds + to stream with transcoding on, and that was with jellyfin with 12 threads assigned on a vm with a i7 10700 with quicksync configured. Dropped it all to stream direct with infuse and no transcoding and performance is great, only downside is can’t stream large files remotely or it would chew up data cap.

[@yensteel]

I think Plex has a pre-encoding option. Could it be worth it if viewing is planned ahead?

[@Nedski42YT]

Suggestion: Compare the performance and power consumption between two Plex servers with nearly identical CPU's. One server having an Intel Core i5-13400 and the other with an Intel Core i5-13400F. The current 6/23/24 prices on Newegg are $227.49 for the i5-13400 and $169.99 for the i5-13400F. Same CPU but one has the iGPU and the other doesn't! Thanks.

[@paulwoodward8265]

fair play, using less power is good, especially if it translates into less heat and noise. Having said that, if you are transcoding for 5 hours a week, it’s not going to impact your power bill anywhere near as much as the idle power usage. I’m much more interested in systems that idle spinning disks when not in use, as well as using very little power on the cpu and mobo under low loads.

[@akeaveney]

Love your scientific approach to tech comparisons!

[@augurseer]

Qnap 624. Amazing transcode. Run truenas

[@smegleberry]

I ditched my Synology and went with the Minisforum MS-01 Beast with external drive bay .I Dont worry about Transcoding anymore . If I need to transcode a file just want it to work . Dont care about a few extra watts more in power usage

[@nascompares]

And more power to you! Literally!

[@smegleberry]

@@nascompares I knew nothing about what a NAS was until I seen your channel . Appreciate all your work

[@HelloHelloXD]

What external drive bay?

[@JFlogerzi]

@@HelloHelloXD he put an external sas card into the server and then through special cables you can connect a JBOD with sas expender/backplane and keep the disks and server in a separate case

[@HelloHelloXD]

@@JFlogerzi I get that. Just asking what specific models he used

[@Ntrglycrn]

Watching this video I am content with my choice of the DS423+ earlier this year. Apart from file backup plex server is its main utilization.

[@yensteel]

Its a good idea to encode most of the audio to acc for simplicity. Theres a bat script you can use, to encode all of the audio, or even specific audio and output somewhere else using ffmpeg. Everything else, such as subtitles and video could be copied. For Synology at least, you could find a workaround to make dts work, but thats from the community, not officially supported.

[@alexlalligator4376]

I'd love to see a vid that shows what's the real minimum spec NAS for running Jellyfin (and maybe at what level), what will no longer run a "normal" ripped HEVC 4k disc or similar. Basically, if your use case is x, you need y etc.

[@brucerosner3547]

IGX was designed precisely for this purpose so its hardly surprising that it works well. Performance degradation is a real issue but if you were to compute electrical cost over a year the difference would be minor.

[@jasperverkroost]

Great video! I wonder what is Plex-wise more power efficient: more smaller drives or less larger drives. Would be interesting for people who are thinking of upgrading: "Do I need to buy a new NAS with more bays or do I replace my current drives by larger ones?"

[@nascompares]

It's a bit niche a topic (even by my standards) and might not get a lot of views..but (frankly) that has never stopped me before! Just added to the 'to do' list! Cheers man

[@alexclifford2485]

Anecdontally, using fewer drives, that are larger, tends to use less power overall. And if the drives can spin down when not in use it will use even less (but reportedly can add to the wear and tear on them).

[@jasperverkroost]

​@@nascompares​Maybe you could investigate this not only using Plex but using a NAS in general. That way it will be of interest to more people. Or even investigate this using different scenario's and see if there's a difference. I mean, you probably have so many drives lying around, that if anybody could investigate this it would be you! 🙂

[@mepm]

What alot of people don't mention with transcoding is that plex is also transcoding audio alot of the time. Now that sounds fine normally, but when doing both i have found it really causes issues on certain file types.

[@yensteel]

Plex is heavily reliant on ffmpeg, and they may not have nonfree options built in to support certain audio. It's a good idea to encode only the audio using a bat script with a separate ffmpeg build. It's a "for loop" so it goes through every video file in a folder. It makes it steaming friendly.

[@pr0jectSkyneT]

I have a Proxmox server with a Ryzen 5900x 128GB RAM and Intel Arc A380 running a TrueNAS VM and a Plex LXC. Unfortunately Plex has an issue with hardware Acceleration when tone mapping is enabled. It otherwise runs fine. Plex needs to get their act together.

[@Lorondos]

Huh, you would think not having a GPU/GPU cores would result in some power saving though maybe the CPU has to work more when it has not got the ability to use GPU cores that are more suited to the task. It would be interesting to see comparable architectures (simliar Ryzen generation with and without an iGPU and the same for Intel, maybe also with and without Quick Sync)

[@hadeez1219]

I'm curious how many concurrent transcoding users the DS423+ can support. I've been looking at it for myself. I would probably have about 5-7 concurrent users max and don't know whether it would support that many people.

[@jackelofnar]

Does extra power really matter that much to me it's the constant frame rate that matters

[@nascompares]

Is this a question or a statement? Or a parable?

[@rickwiggeman6353]

Does this mean the new asustor lockerstor gen3 will nog be suiteble for an plex media server with transcoding....?

[@nascompares]

It will be able to do it, it just won't be that efficient when it's doing it, in terms of CPU utilisation

[@PatrickDKing]

I bet Rob fantasizes that the duck is a seagull...

[@HoleLeashIt]

These Ryzen NASes are upgradable right? Maybe they’ll come up with a gpu module that can accelerate transcoding

[@Mark-xr4zt]

I would be really interested to see how both energy use and performance stacks up when comparing something like an eight bay Synology NAS with a homebuilt NAS running TrueNAS and an NVIDIA GPU to take on the heavy lifting to re-encode 4K HDR content. I ended up having to move PLEX off my synology onto an intel based CPU with GPU to try and better manage the re-encoding issue but even an Alderlake CPU doesn’t cope well with realtime re-encoding of 4K HDR Bluray content. So I have been trying to figure out what would give best bang for buck in terms of energy and encoding performance overall. The NAS boxes are great but I just don’t think they have the computational power to do half the stuff they claim very well beyond storage how on earth my eight bay is supposed to be able to run VMs is beyond me, when I tried it, performance was awful.

[@ymeshulin]

Do you have Plex Pass? You don't have hardware transcoding without one. Alder Lake can do more 4k transcodes simultaneously than any normally caffeinated person would ever need.

[@MWONG06]

Please do a dedicated video calling out the current NAS market leaders all at once for the disappointing, underpowered hardware they have been releasing for the general consumer market. More competition in the market from Ugreen will hopefully improve the quality and performance of future NAS releases for the general consumer. Synology deciding it was appropriate for the DS423+ (2023) to be equipped with the Intel J4125 (2019) and only 1Gbe ports is embarrassing and honestly feels like a slap in the face to the consumer. The N100 is the least powerful CPU in the Ugreen lineup, but still demolishes the likes of QNAP and Synology. The only one that is keeping up is Terramaster with the F4-424 and Pro models.

[@marlon32]

Be carefull with upgrade to PMS 1.40.3.8555 This will crash HW decoding with active tone mapping. So I had to downgrade. What happens to 923+ if you decoding more than one file? 😅

[@doomtomb3]

ummm I will not buy a NAS without int gfx. I avoid transcoding like the plague but if other users need it, I want to have it.

[@waynetaylor2784]

Bit of an oversimplification tbh, you need too look at alot of other stuff, im an amd fanboi BUT for transcoding yiu cant beat intel's quick sync for plex, also speed of your network interface alot of wireless wouldn't do 4k 8k well.. my nass used intel 12500t or 13600t or a dgpu

[@nascompares]

To be fair, I think I literally say "..now...this is an oversimplification and not representing sporadic day to day use"...but that might be the other Plex SSD video from 2 weeks ago

[@cavalen]

I Hate Seagulls 🤣

[@nascompares]

Yep, nailed it

[@blcjck8121]

Great video as always. But 8K or anything over 150 mbps @4K simply isn't relevant.

[@adikath7193]

Is there even a difference if you don’t pay for Plex pass ?

[@nascompares]

Only in so far as you cannot use hardware transcoding, and therefore your CPU will use more power (comparatively) to transcode via s/W transcoding, with results in more energy use and therefore a higher cost. But we are talking micro costs and from here, it's down to your tariff and service provider

[@wojtek-33]

If you don't pay, you only get software transcoding, which is all the AMD system can do anyhow since it doesn't have a GPU. The intel system would have likely had similar power usage if he disabled hardware transcoding.

[@ThePaulpope]

If you need to transcode you need better playback devices

[@Hansen999]

You will have to transcode if you are watching remotely, no matter what device

[@ThePaulpope]

@@Hansen999 Nope I can watch anything native on my TV's

[@Hansen999]

@@ThePaulpope Do you drag your tv around everywhere you go? By remotely I mean outside your home

[@ThePaulpope]

@@Hansen999 What are you talking about ? My laptop will play anything at all ....My phone play's 4k H265 with zero issues .... I frankly see no need to transcode anything ever anywhere ....

[@Hansen999]

@@ThePaulpope You forget that internet speeds sucks in some part of the world, hence you need to transcoder no matter the device when you are watching remotely unless you are watching DVD quality. But hey, congrats that you got great internet 👏

[@espressomatic]

1. don't transcode, it's a waste of time. Just keep media at different bitrates/resolutions if you don't want to stream the highest quality source. I dont even bother streaming out from my home server anyway and I have multi-gig symmetrical connection. Not when it's simple enough to stream from a cached torrent via debrid anywhere on the planet.

[@nascompares]

Will someone please think of the storage!!!!

[@obxphillyfpv7435]

That seems way more expensive than just transcoding randomly. The amount of extra storage required to keep files at every usable resolution for every device you planned to use would not be cost efficient.

[@tormaid42]

I agree. Don’t understand the point when gigabit ethernet and even just semi-decent wifi are enough to stream UHD blu-rays, which are the heaviest possible media normal people will use. I guess people who only watch things on their phones care?

[@gacpac]

Cache from a torrent? are talking using vlc or ilegal popcorntime situation?

[@chekiechen]

People rarely ONLY watch on their phones, and also people rarely ONLY watch on TVs in their living rooms. Usually it’s a combination. When we are on public transportation or in hotel rooms with poor connection, transcoding comes handy. I personally also rarely use transcoding, like a couple of times every year. I file this under “I might not need or use it, but I still want to have it” category. Also keeping two copies of each media file is just too much work, not to mention extra storage it takes. I would rather have a separate N100 mini pc to handle transcoding if the NAS is poor at it.