I'm just gonna start calling these episodes "Plex Science" because
I'm doing a lot of weird testing here
stuff that I enjoy finding out
stuff that I've received many questions about and
why not? It's going to be a new series
I'm gonna include a few of the previous episodes
and I've got a separate playlist in the description below
Plex Science
If you've ever wondered how low you can go with the Plex server
We're going to sort of answer that here
or at least we're gonna start the discussion about it
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Full disclosure as always
This video is part of an ongoing monthly sponsorship with Plex.
We've been doing this for a year and a half now
I think it's been pretty good
we've made some really good content
and I've been
really enjoying diving deep into figuring out the little nuances of Plex
moving forward
in this episode I wanted to take a little bit of a pivot
compared to the normal topics discussed with Plex media servers
Typically, there's all of these, you know, super overkill over-the-top plex media servers. I'm
Someone guilty of that as well
dual Xeons, lots of RAM, tons of hard drives
And that's fine
but not everybody has that
not everybody wants that
so
What can you get away with
in terms of low end hardware for Plex?
We're gonna be focusing on one
kind of nuance to that question today and that would be
Direct play as this commenter pointed out here
a lot of us talk about transcoding
and that's because that's one of the primary benefits of using something like Plex Media Server
aside from the organizational and metadata aspect of course
is that it can transcode to different devices
But it has always seemed like a weird focus to myself as well
because I don't really watch on devices that can't direct play
I don't watch on my phone or on a tablet or anything like that
And I certainly don't watch you know from my home connection over the internet
I realized that has plenty of use cases and plenty of people do I
I don't
so
Everything for me is direct play
And so the question was
Why does everyone focus on all of these high-end servers
when you can just do direct stream
from
much lower end hardware?
And I wanted to figure out
I didn't expect this to work so easily
So I wanted to see how low I can go.
This is my little Trashtop
that I've covered in some budget gaming related videos
It's an 82 dollar
or actually, I think 79
79 or 82 dollar office PC
that I got from a surplus auction on eBay.
There's plenty of them
They flood eBay and Craigslist every year
as companies get rid of their old computers
and bring in new ones
This bad boy was built for Windows 7, although it has Windows 10 on it
It has an Intel Core i5-2400
that is a 2nd gen Core i5
and 4 gigabytes of RAM
a boot SSD
and a 1 terabyte
kind of weird like not super consistent hard drive
so
Naturally, I set up a folder share on it for some Plex media
I installed the Plex Media Server app
and got going
and yes
It works fine to direct play medias off of it
I could direct play 4k blu-ray HDR blu-rays
using the Plex Media Player app on my main PC
over the network just directly played it
I could direct play a 1080p movie
and I could direct play a like 360p TV show
no problem what so ever, worked on TV
worked on my PC
and used virtually, no resources on the actual computer
There's a quite a bit of RAM usage going for that
that 4 gigabytes is not enough for even Windows 10 these days
uh-huh, but
in terms of playback it required no resources at all
Now kicking it up to transcoding is of course where you're gonna run into trouble
and this quad core really can't keep up
It's weird, because in chunks it can actually transcode the 4k file
I got it to convert automatically and it was transcoding
from 4k to 4k and it was doing it
But it would only play for like a few seconds at a time
like maybe 10 seconds at most
before it have to buffer again
and
But if you transcoded 1080p down
it had quite a bit better luck
like I believe the 1080p movie
transcoded to a low bitrate
720p stream was fine
Like it was still barely using any resources and
and transcoded fine
and transcoding the weird 360p TV show
Barely used any resources and had no problem,
but the 4k blu-ray transcoding to a higher resolution
just hammered that CPU hundred percent
But this is an $80 computer
that aside from storage
That's all you need to spend to have a plenty competent Plex server
If you're doing direct play
which if you're just playing with in your house for your TVs or your computers, like I said
All you need
so this was a little short one
I want to do more testing like this
but I want to start this off as the intro to the new series
to get your all's feedback as far as what specifically you would like to see tested
but make the claim here
i5-2400 Direct Play
more than good to go
Hello. Hello bud
even the cat approves
As always I do have affiliate links for Plex
if you want to sign up for free
wanna purchase of Plex pass
or want to gift a Plex pass to a friend or family member
links to those will be in the description down below helps
Let Plex know that I'm worth supporting and yada yada.
Be sure to check them out
Thanks so much for watching hit the like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more awesome tech content
And I will see you in the next o...
What are you doing?
Oh, ok
I'll see you in the next one [Transcribed by Cvolton]