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Thread: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

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    5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    I'm looking at getting a 5th Gen i5 NUC as a new desktop and use it also for plex transcoding my blueray rips for iPads and chromcasts in my house, does any one have any experience of using a NUC for this?
    Last edited by Jay; 22-02-2015 at 01:59 AM.
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Not used a NUC myself but there's no reason why it won't cope with Plex transcoding.
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    It's more about the processor and storage than the form factor. I'd have thought an i5 that is mainly running PLEX would have more than enough grunt, but that might depend on how many simultaneous streams you might be running.
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Quote Originally Posted by peterb View Post
    It's more about the processor and storage than the form factor. I'd have thought an i5 that is mainly running PLEX would have more than enough grunt, but that might depend on how many simultaneous streams you might be running.
    It is an i5 but it's the mobile version of the i5 used in notebooks. I will probably on be doing one stream to be honest.
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    I've got the Haswell version not sure what version number that it. Although it's fine playing local content, transcoding to either of my Roku boxes doesn't work for uncompressed Blu-ray rips (created using MakeMKV). This is running Windows 7, so I may try reinstalling it with *IX and seeing if it works better headless.

    For reference, my (almost) 3 year old iMac which has a i7-3770 can cope easily with a local stream and 2 transcodes at the same time, I'm not sure how the i5 in the NUC compares with that?

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    A dualcore 2.2 n54l microserver is more than enough to transcode 1 stream.

    Any core2 or above will be fine unless the source material is ultra high bitrate.

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    I'm not to familiar with Plex but isn't is possible/practical to keep batch-encoded, static transcodes rather than doing it on-the-fly?

    AFAIK the i5 would support Quicksync if that's a factor.

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    The NUCs use the low power varients of mobile chips, so compared to full power desktop processors they are slow. Think Celeron G1800/Pentium G3200 in terms of raw horsepower.

    If Plex uses quicksync it should be as fast as anything else, potentially faster if they improved quicksync for broadwell.

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Not to my knowledge. Plex transcodes on the fly as the whole purpose of Plex is to feed a viewable video to the client. The client could be a phone, a TV, computer, Roku box, whatever, each which has it's own supported video format. Static transcodes wouldn't do the job.
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Most devices now support at least h264 level 4.1. Sure, it would likely need a few encodes for each if you're viewing on vastly different devices or want different bitrates for LAN/WAN viewing, but given the quality/compression advantages you can get from slower software encodes it would be worth considering if possible. We're mostly past the days of devices having strange specific limitations on their decode abilities for well-established codecs like h264.

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Quote Originally Posted by b0redom View Post
    I've got the Haswell version not sure what version number that it. Although it's fine playing local content, transcoding to either of my Roku boxes doesn't work for uncompressed Blu-ray rips (created using MakeMKV). This is running Windows 7, so I may try reinstalling it with *IX and seeing if it works better headless.

    For reference, my (almost) 3 year old iMac which has a i7-3770 can cope easily with a local stream and 2 transcodes at the same time, I'm not sure how the i5 in the NUC compares with that?
    Was your nuc the i5 or i3?
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    I'm going to give the new NUC a try once it's in stock at scan
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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Mine is the i5. I'll bung a Linux distribution on a spare disk and do some testing when I get some time.

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    The NUC's are pretty decent. I'd imagine the i5 in there would be enough to handle even blu ray transcoding IF the storage its running from can keep up.

    If you have an old 2.5" 5400 RPM hard disk you may struggle pulling multiple streams from there!

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    It's connected to a N40L microserver running FreeNAS. So is the iMac. They're both hardwired at GigE.

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    Re: 5th Gen i5 NUC - Plex Transcoding

    Quote Originally Posted by b0redom View Post
    For reference, my (almost) 3 year old iMac which has a i7-3770 can cope easily with a local stream and 2 transcodes at the same time, I'm not sure how the i5 in the NUC compares with that?
    Not sure how helpful this is but my i7-3770K at reference clock can handle at least 4 simultaneous 1080p (or nearly, 1 was to whatever resolution an iPhone 5 is) transcode jobs without skipping a beat. The source in each case was 1080p.

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