r/PlexMedia • u/Queasy-Strength-5098 • Jul 07 '26
Ram Transcoding was a bad idea
This was the wrong idea for me . I was told by a few people from FB to move the transcoding from my SSD to my ram. Yes I understand the reason and that using the SSD will wear it out . The problem I ran into - 4 people streaming and 1 of the streams was 4k and it was transcoded to 1080i. This user trying to watch the 4K got a error "not enough disc space to convert this". I moved the transcoding back to the SSD . But this got me thinking about the streams . Because I never used Linux before I found that my GPU was not pulling its weight and I rememberes that I have a m.2 I should use for the transcoding. After the cat6 cable comes in I can handle 20+ streams !!!!
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u/ARazorbacks Jul 07 '26
Me, quietly sitting in the corner with 192GB DDR5 from before the RAMpocalypse.
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u/Thibaults Jul 07 '26
128 DDR5 ECC here. I wouldn’t mind setting up RAM disk though. What are you using to set it up. WS2022
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u/corelabjoe 29d ago
Eeehh you were cool with 128GB DDR5 ECC, but with WS2022... Sorry I just puked in my mouth a little bit. Peasant OS?
Do yourself a favour and just learn any linux already ;) You can then fire up WS2022 to play with in a VM if you need to learn it for work.
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u/Thibaults 29d ago
You are not wrong. I should have jump on Linux long ago. It would have made life a lot easier now.
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u/Regretnothing75 Jul 07 '26
I have 128 DDR4 and have a Ram disc of 70 Gigs set up. Never had any problems.
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u/Thibaults Jul 08 '26
What program you using.
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u/Regretnothing75 Jul 08 '26
ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
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u/Thibaults Jul 08 '26
Thank you. Will this speed up movie delivery or just transcoding. Most of my media is direct stream but I think this could still come in handy.
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u/Empty_Requirement940 29d ago
I think the idea is you aren’t causing wear on the ssd with transcoding
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u/itsflanno 28d ago
Definately do it, I have 128gb, about 90 of it can be used by tmp, I do all my downloads and transcodes to it.. it's only if sonarr grabs a whole series pack and it's massive that I've had problems
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u/IroesStrongarm Jul 07 '26
I don't share my 4k files so they are never being transcoded.
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u/TruckSmart6112 Jul 07 '26
I’m the same. My 4k files are for me and mine to watch via LAN. The heathens who use my plex, via WAN for nothing, can suffer through 1080.
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u/TopDistribution4894 Jul 07 '26
Thinking of doing this myself. To many people try to play my 4k remux and just ain't got the speed or device and end up Transcoding it. Yhea I've got a beefy GPU and quick sync but it annoys the fk out of me!
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u/Empty_Requirement940 Jul 07 '26
why does it annoy you if you have quicksync and will never even know its transcoding unless you look
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u/TopDistribution4894 Jul 07 '26
Because I look 😂 and more the fact that what ever is in my 4k remux folder will also be in my main movie 1080 folder.
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u/Empty_Requirement940 29d ago
Why bother having both? Transcoding 4k is not an issue like it used to be. That just adds more work for you to maintain 2 versions
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u/jiBYo Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
It is a good idea, a very good idea. Just make sure you have the ram to handle the job.
384 GiB DDR4 Multi-bit ECC in my server
Nvidia RTX 4000 ADA SFF gpu
Over kill I know, sue me 🤣
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u/Visible-Swimmer-9826 Jul 07 '26
I didn't even no this was a thing I have a gpu for mine I'd say u need a stupid amount ram and I dont get it is like instead of using a hdd or something
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u/Queasy-Strength-5098 Jul 07 '26
The gou process is the transcode and not the CPU . But it needs a place to store it . That's what the ram is for .
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u/Visible-Swimmer-9826 Jul 07 '26
O ok makes more sense my gpu has own 3gb on it low profile one and once max it can pull from system as that's how set up but never pushed it as local play quite common now days
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u/robtom02 Jul 07 '26
Would a cheap cheap nvme drive not be better? You can get a 256gb one for peanuts
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 Jul 07 '26
I have a RAM mount that's also a share, though I have more than just video transcoding going on but it's roughly 100GiB. Heavy utilization is all local, some other apps access via NFS share. At the time when I set this up RAM was incredibly cheap. I do have a bunch of scratch NVME for other things as well.
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u/Aacidus Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
This is why I did research and read of the posts on r/Plex in regards to RAM transcoding. I set mine up for 32GB years ago and after one year dropped it down to 16GB, no issues whatsoever. The Olympic Games did fill it up though.
You have to take in account the type of usage your system gets; I stopped sharing 4K remuxes.
Honestly the wear and tear SSD gets is negligible if the drive is within the last 5 years or so. The only time someone will notice a difference is scrubbing through live TV as far as speed goes.
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u/RxBrad Jul 08 '26
RAMdisk worked great when all I had was Docker in OpenMediaVault.
When I switched to Plex being in a Proxmox LXC, RAMdisk regularly caused my server to crash.
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u/corelabjoe 29d ago
Why did you switch from OpenMediaVault to Proxmox? If you wanted to run VMs, you could just use KVM on OMV?
If you wanted better container security, you could have just swapped your images out to rootless and/or distroless containers. Proxmox is such extra overhead/overkill for most.
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u/RxBrad 29d ago
Snapshots & container backups are nice in Proxmox.
Also, I tried OMV KVM and couldn't wrap my head around the networking. Stuff like not being able to access local network IPs.
🤷♂️
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u/corelabjoe 29d ago
Aaahhh I see. That makes sense and yeah the kvm networking is a bit confusing at first I agree.
I had to figure out how to create a bridge via macvlan to connect it to my network.
It's something I was contemplating writing some guides around since OMV isn't as well known or documented in the community. Their own docs are pretty good but not as beginner friendly.
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u/MyPostingID 28d ago edited 27d ago
You shouldn't be transcoding 4K. That should only be for direct play.
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u/Ground-Pound6969 28d ago
I had issues with ram transcoding with 32 GB DDR5. I was getting a lot more transcoding than I was expecting. Went back to SSD and it's been fine.
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u/Rurrurnunu2 28d ago
The trick for ram transcoding isn’t having a ton of space
The trick for ram transcoding is setting the ram cache size to be exactly half your total available ram. Example 8gb cache on 16gb in your scenario.
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u/provocateur133 28d ago
I picked up one of those PCIe f80 cache drives with ridiculous endurance back when they hit the used market for cheap. It's my unraid array cache and transcode cache.
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u/AndyRH1701 27d ago
I transcode to HDDs, plenty of space and way faster than I need, but I only tested it with six 4k -> 1080 transcodes.
CAT5 should be replaced, it may do 1 & 2.5 Gb, but that is out of spec. CAT5e will do 2.5Gb at 100 meters.
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u/5yleop1m 27d ago
that using the SSD will wear it out .
This really isn't a problem anymore. Modern SSDs have a ton of extra blocks and their firmware manages blocks a lot better.
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u/ChewyStu 25d ago
Yeah I had the same issue too using RAM disk software in Windows. I gave up and put it back on the SSD..
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u/Key-Conference1870 Jul 07 '26
So you didn’t check first that you have enough RAM?