download plex media server for windows 8.1

Wife read up on RAM Disks and figured out we could point the transcode location to /dev/shm to transcode directly to RAM instead of the 5400RPM disk. Still an improvement overall compared to all cores running 3.06GHz as previous. I can get two cores at 3.7GHz - 3.8GHz, but with all four under load it drops to 3.19 GHz.

After some research, figured out how to enable boost. Figured out that CPU boost isn't working, and my CPU is locked at 3.1GHz max. Transcode now takes ~26 seconds consistently. Odd that it varied, but HWmonitor showed the CPU being a bit erratic in its boosting and dropping. Did what could be done to optimize the OS (not much) and maybe shaved off a second or two. CPU boosts up to 3.8GHz no problem, but transcode speeds are exactly the same as the laptop (30 seconds). After some review, it seems Win7 is the best performing Windows version for Plex, and uses the least resources compared to 8.1 and 10. We did our best to buy new or open box and kept this build pretty cheap. We decided the laptop could be repurposed, and then built a purpose driven mini server for Plex.Īll testing below was done with the same blu-ray rip, at 1080p with 5.1DolbyĪSRock mini-ITX board (I forget the model)

It worked, but 1080p Blue-Ray rips took 30+ seconds to transcode and/or load on our Roku 4 TV client. Our original setup was a laptop running an i5-2520m and 4GB DDR3 1333. And while using the TV's captions loading minimally faster, it wasn't worth it for losing the subtitle text formatting. And in our specific case, we wanted the baked in subtitles for anime, rather than using the burn only to get captioning from the TV, since our TV's subtitles are ugly. We only stream one thing at a time on our only TV, so our focus was on transcode/loading speed, as opposed to number of streams. I thought I'd share some of the changes and improvements my wife and I discovered as we went. Been having an ordeal this past week with Plex and finally got my server configured.

Download plex media server for windows 8.1