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Forum Discussion
Plex Cloud Alternative - ReadyNAS NAS Storage
Barb Gonzalez of SoundAndVision.com posted a great article about using ReadyNAS NAS Storage as an alternative to the soon-to-be-canceled Plex Cloud. We've posted a few snippets below. Read...
StephenB wrote:
Though the article focus is Plex Cloud (not Plex in general). That was a service that allowed you to create a plex library on Google Drive (and perhaps some other cloud storage). I played with it a bit, but I don't think it was ever linked to real-time transcoding.
Yes, but one thing that Plex Cloud offered was that it was the upload speed of the storage host (Google) that delivered the content remotely. So, transcoding was generally unnecessary, at least if you do some of the things you mention to reduce file size and bit rate (which I have always done, though a bit higher rate than you to account for action movies). But even taking those steps, my paltry upload speed is insufficient to deliver content taken even from standard blu-ray without some jerkiness, and forget about 4K. So a NAS is not a viable alternative for many who used the cloud option for remote delivery.
FIOS is available to me, but other factors have kept me from changing. To increase my upload speed on Spectrum, I would need a commercial account.
There are no current readynas devices that have the cpu power to transcode 4k in real time.
And no readynas devices with a GPU to offload transcoding to, which would need to be a 600 series intel igpu or 1000 series nvidia gpu, or newer versions.
Further, plex currently doesn't support converting from HDR to SDR, nor does it support nvidia hardware encoding while on linux.
So the only real option currently for any 4k transcoding on linux is an intel cpu with a 630 or similar igpu, and washed out colors if any HDR is transcoded to SDR.
Either way, upload speeds for most people are no where near the 100+ meg for a single 4k outbound plex stream to remote. Nor will 4k be remote streamed over mobile any time soon.
The only real current solution is to keep a separate 4k library for use with only local 4k clients that can direct play anyway.
If you are collecting 4k media, and you are worried about the extra hassles or space used by keeping separate 4k and 1080p copies, then you have bigger problems. And in that case you probably shouldn't even be storing 4k media in the first place.
But thats just my opinion.
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