I’ve been running a headless Ubuntu server for about 10 years or so. At first, it was just a file/print server, so I bought a super low power motherboard/processor to cut down on the energy bill. It’s a passively cooled Intel Celeron J3455 “maxed out” with 16BG of RAM.

Since then it’s ballooned into a Plex/Shinobi/Photoprism/Samba/Frigate/MQTT/Matrix/Piwigo monster. It has six drives in RAID6 and a 7th for system storage (three of the drives are through a PCI card). I’m planning on moving my server closet, and I’ll be upgrading the case into a rack-mount style case. While I’m at it, I figured I could upgrade the hardware as well. I was curious what I should look for in hardware.

I’ve built a number of gaming PCs in the past, but I’ve never looked at server hardware. What features should I look for? Also, is there anything specific (besides a general purpose video card) that I can buy to speed up video encoding? It’d be nice to be able to real-time transcode video with Plex.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•4 months ago

    I’m not entirely certain. QuickSync is an Intel GPU feature and generally just listed as Yes/No on ark.intel.com so I’m inclined to suspect it doesn’t have significant change from one generation to another. Most GPUs have a limited number of of video streams they can transcode at a time, so if you’re exceeding that number then I believe it will have to brute force it on the processor which will be anemic on an older Celeron. Have you verified that Plex is actually using QuickSync to transcode? If its been hitting the processor this whole time that would easily do that.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•4 months ago

      Not sure what Plex is using, but Shinobi and Photoprism do.

      Plex usually runs at native resolution, but it can just barely run if it has to downscale or bake in subtitles in real time. I’ll have to check the settings to see what it’s using.

      Edit: Ah, looks like you need to pay for Plex Pass to enable Quick Sync.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•4 months ago

        That would certainly do it! Stating the obvious, here, looks like you have 3 clear paths to take:

        1. Purchase Plex Pass to enable hardware transcode
        2. Switch to Jellyfin to avoid paying for Plex Pass
        3. Upgrade the server to something with more CPU horsepower (and of course higher energy consumption) to compensate for lack of hardware transcode support