I had massive problems with subtitles and transcoding after following this guide. Kept getting the error message "Conversion failed". Then when I searched the logs I saw that a file used in correlation to subtitles (dont know what file or what is was, lots of strange and new stuff to me) couldn't be located, I saw that it was on R:\. After reading your comment I thought maybe setting the path to just R:\ was the culprit so I created a folder inside R:\ called Transcode, and lo and behold, it worked perfectly when I set the path to R:\Transcode. I did some testing and apparently, after I dismount and mount R: (using ImDisk), the Transcode folder goes away but Plex just creates a new folder on R:\ in that case so it worked out fine. Thank you! :)
@@sinxcosx1337 I just posted a comment "I run emby and plex I'm wondering if I can use the same ram location for both or do I need to run another instance of IMdisktk? Thanks" But now I know to make 2 location names. Thanks!
@@back4more420 Use 1 RAMdisk for both. If you set up 2 8GB disks they could each use 8GB & be capped there. If you set up 1 16GB disk they could each use 8GB of the disk or 1 could use 12 & there still be 4GB for the other to use. Setting them up with different folders is probably best, to prevent any errors where one deletes something the other is using or whatnot, but unless you need to limit them & want them each to have dedicated RAM that is just for them there's no benefits to having them separate
@@snehnesne@jayzah the media doesn't need to be smaller than the RAMdrive, you don't need to transcode to whole thing before starting, it will transcode it in parts, so it only really needs enough space to hold 1-2 minutes of the video at a time. Having more space will likely make it easier to fast forward & rewind, but if you are transcoding a 10GB file you'll need at most 2GB, the bigger concern is how MANY you can transcode at the same time. So 4 people having transcode streams need 4× as much, if you have less space Plex will adapt & do smaller chunks, but multiple streams will still need their own chunk
I know this video is old, but just wanted to express my appreciation for it making me aware of ImDisk, which is awesome. Also, if you'll only be using your RAM disk for Plex transcoding, you should disable indexing in the drive properties as it will just take up space on the RAM disk with no real added benefit.
@@xMxyztplk yeah i figured. I've already set it up using less than a full stick. I'm not sure if I'm really seeing a huge difference, and I'm pretty sure I had some kind of transcoding failure last night towards the end of a show.
@@rfehr613 Try running a Transcode as big as you plan on using of at least an hour. After it's been running for 15 minutes click the properties of the RAMdisk. See how full the disk is. If it has more than 5% free space you are okay, if it has less than 10% you might want to look at maybe increasing your RAMdisk size. If it has less than 5% it could be the reason your trancode had an error. I just tried out ImDisk & discovered it's missing an important feature that SoftPerfect (The program I use, which is discontinued, But as the machine it's on is not used to do anything except serve my Plex I'm not concerned) has. In SoftPerfect when you create your drive you have an option for [Hard Disk Emulation (Slower)] which I always have off. The ImDisk was a bit slower than SoftPerfect, but when I turned that on in SoftPerfect it was about the same, but still just a little slower instead of a lot.
@@xMxyztplk I'll try running a transcode like your say and monitoring. Though after i initially set it up, it didn't seem to be using much at all. I think i was using well under 10%. I just pulled it up now, and i guess i was mistaken... I configured it for 8GB, which is equivalent to 1 of my 4 RAM sticks. I should probably knock that down since 99% of the time I'm only doing 1 transcode at a time. On another note, i just saw i had indexing and compression on for this RAMdisk, so I just turned them off. Let's see how that does. I can also turn off xmp in the BIOS, as that could be messing with things.
I running a stream on 2 rokus, my phone and locally on my pc/server, which at the moment is all of my plex streaming methods. It never used more than 250 megabytes. I set my virtual ram drive to 500 megabytes to be safe. I only have 8gb of ram in my pc. So far so good. Is there anything I am missing, that would require me to allocate more ram for transcoding?
And since you now have a RAMdisk, you may also want to move Google Chrome cache there. Same as with Plex this should slightly increase its performance and save your SSD lifespan. Just add --disk-cache-dir="PATH_TO_FOLDER_ON_RAMDISK" to the "Target:" field in your Chrome's shortcut properties.
I set this up since your last video and as it happens used the same software. I can confirm that this works flawlessly. I've been using this system for the last month or so...
Ive been noticing huge slowdowns going from a 7200RPM HDD to a dedicated 8TB 5400RPM HDD. I have 64GB of ram on my PC for multitasking and design purposes. Hopefully this will help eliminate the stuttering
Wow. This made all the difference. I only have 8gigs of ram (allocated 4 to imDisk), but everything is running so much smoother with faster loading and so far, no glitches. Luv ya work!
If you are making a RAMdisk that's less than 4GB the Softperfect RAMdisk he was talking about 1st but said it wasn't free has a Free version, but limits to 4GB. (Mostly for future readers) It's a better program, so long as you only need 4GB or less
Thanks for the idea. Was battling with slow drives, but a server with a ton of RAM. Created a 10GB RAM disk, using built in virtual disk abilities of Windows Server 2012, with a boot up script that recreates the drive on restart, and this has changed my world with transcoding. Keep up the good vids!
I'm now to plex i have a file server with 2x intel Xeon x5660 @2.8Ghz and OMG I WAS thinking about this on my way home! I have 48gb in my Plex server and i was like why cant i just setup a ram disk so i am not loading up my SSD! I'm kind of surprised they don't have this in Plex to keep it in rap if you have the capacity
On Ubuntu(virtualized with HyperV), sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,size=12G tmpfs media/RAMDISK < -- This isn't much different than the line that needs added to fstab for auto-mount on startup. That said, just grep your history for the command if you lose it after any random reboot. I always look around for my footsteps with, history | grep 'some command I ran' When you're rocking 2x AMD Opteron x4386 @ 3.5Ghz with 96 Gigs, tossing Plex 18G in total can be a huge help for large files and transcoding. I'm watching a user Transcode 4k to 720p right now, and of my 12 Gig Ram Disk, he's using 1.2G at 601 chunks or tmp files. A stat that can easily be observed with, watch 'ls -lh /media/RAMDISK/Transcode/plex--transcode-the_rest_of_the_file_name_you_should_just_hit_tab_to_complete.'
Question I am a avid use of plex and have almost uploaded all of my dvds to it, however i ahave a problem. and i think many of ples users might. I want to buy my media legaly, however i hav found several problem one Google play can download to windows, FUltraviolet you have to use flixter and itunes itunes. How or is there anyway way of buying a digital version of your movie that is not DRM and i can add to plex
Ok think I'm having an issue. -Installed 16gb ram -Downloaded imdisk toolkit -Open ramdisk configuration -Set-up 10gb and clicked launch at windows setup. -opened webserver -put R:\ (my ram drive) -saved changes -started movie, but not stating transcoding on dashboard or the drive is not showing any activity. Help please
Does anyone know what the point of increasing the size of the drive would be over 2gb? I say 2gb because most threads say that should be the minimum for some reason. I just tested 2gb and one transcode fills up the drive and dumps portions not being utilized once full. I can't see the point in making a large drive like many users do, unless you're transcoding lots of videos at once that could possibly lead to drive limitations. Maybe if you rewind to save time not having to transcode the same segments again?
Whats' the recommended size for a transcode disk? I only have 8GB of ram on my server. I could spare a couple GB but want to make sure that's big enough.
Can anybody answer if using dynamic memory over static is better for performance? From random reading, it seems like it would be, but it is also "slower".
Hi, I set up everything as per the video, I get the Sessions and the plex-transcode xxxxx folders, but nothing goes in there? Any idea why? I have 32GB RAM and I made the R drive for 10GB.
Great Video. Question if I set a RAM disk for a determined amount of space will I lose that RAM for the system? lets say I have 32GB and set a ram disk of 10GB will I only be left with 22GB for the rest of the system? Thank You.
thanks for the great tip as always. I love your Plex channel. BTW, I have 32GB RAM and I allocated 16GB to it. I noticed when I transcode a 4K video, my memory performance almost maxed out at 95%. I was rather surprised that it spiked up so high. Is that normal?
StarWind RAM Disk is and is windows 10 - I am using 48 Min Ram and the max on the Ram Disk is 27 gigs - I can have up to 150 gigs in my desktop & up to 300 in my server - after the ram tras coding the system now encodes at 89x times faster than normal, thanks
Hi folks, can anyone please tell me if a ram drive is still needed if I fit a GFX card? I have been given a gtx960 which is meant to do 13 transcodes so im confused. I havnt fitted the card or setup a ram drive yet....
I need a way to set plex to use a different storage location for the temporary recording files, my main library is on a 36TB server, and sometimes the windows DVR has momentary issues accessing that SMB share, but a split second of loss, can mean an entire movie doesnt get recorded
Plex server has 16 GB RAM... using an 8 GB RAM disk now. Works great! Was on a SSD before so it was pretty quick already, but feel like it's a bit quicker now.
I just bought a machine for a small PLEX server. Dell OptiPlex 3020 Desktop Computer - Intel Core i5 i5-4590 3.30 GHz - Small Form Factor 16 FB ram with a win7 OS on a dedicated ssd. What do you think? I have an external Samsung 1TB drive for the media.
If I transcode to 720 p i will need like half a MB per second. So if plex transcodes 120 minutes per movie I'll need 3.6 GB per Movie. So 10 GB will be only enough for roughly 3 streams of different movies at a time. Is that right?
Hi it really worked well for the movies but does not affect audio files (mp3s). Mp3s were loading slow from before and after the installation of ram disk it does not affect the audio files. Did you try also with audio files? I tried it on android phone with 4gb Ram!
I moved my movie libraries to Google Drive and Drop Box, but now that I’ve done that I get buffering time out constantly and a message that reads that my server is not fast enough. How could that be if all the movies are now saved at the Google Drive server cloud? Also all my movies are convert to MP4. My home internet download connection is at 237Mbps. So why do I get buffering every minutes or so? I even selected the “Automatically adjust quality” and I still get time-out buffering. Please help. Any suggestions or recommendations? Thank you.
I’ve been using RAM disk for awhile now for Plex. My daughter and in laws share my Plex on Apple TV and my brother on his phone. I had RAM disk size of 4 gb and found once that’s used up during a busy period, Plex can stall, so I increased it to 6 gb which has been enough. My windows 7 pro system running Plex server has 16 gig ram btw. I may up that after getting my new sas raid 0 12 Tb set up. Fun stuff!
In Settings>Server>Transcoder>Advanced you can set the "Transcoder default duration" (in minutes) to store (per stream.) More RAM would be the best solution, but if you don't have enough to allocate what you need, you may try setting the default duration to a shorter period of time. (30 or 60 minutes, rather than 120.) The downside; of course, being that if you fast forward or rewind outside of the existing transcode storage duration, you'll have to wait for the transcode to redo the section of video you moved to.... (Mileage may vary, depending on hardware...)
Excellent Video.. Bookmarked and was able to quickly reference key points to get a 20gb drive set up.. First video loaded up instantly with zero problems, and temp files populated.. Well done.
Thanks for this, I'm linking this to a few friends. As I'm not familiar with doing this. Also, I get this is geared towards Windows and that more RAM is better. Wanted to mention, on my RockPro64 running Ayufan Ubuntu Server 18.04 and it has 4GB of RAM. I keep it capped to only allow 2 transcodes. It still makes a huge difference when starting and scrubbing a 1080p video. Whereas before a full 1080p transcode was hardly usable. Partially because r/w to a sd card is incredibly slow. Oh and the ram usage for it is hardly a 500MB lift for the one video. Still leaving me with ~2.5GB of RAM.
Yes, if you set up a 7.2GB RAM Disk your system essentially puts a 7.2GB file on the RAM that your computer thinks exists as a Drive on your system, essential it's a VHD or VHDX (Virtual HardDrive) or Pagefile.
How much ram would be suggested? Im getting ready to build my first plex server and want to offload the trandcoding to ram to save the SSD. Is there a particular ratio or ram to trandcoding stream?
Hello Jason. I don’t know how you doing this but this is another great video form you :-) thanks. Did you think if doing it this way you are using less of a electricity?
Your videos are super easy to watch and enjoyable! I found your channel from googling "Nvidia Shield Plex Server" and so far I have installed PlexPy and doing the RAM disk. Thanks man!!!!
RAM doesn't actually do any of the transcoding. The GPU or CPU does all that work, then stores it somewhere while it is being played. Using a ramdisk, transcoded video is written into RAM instead of to a hard drive or SSD. (The primary purpose for this, is to limit wear on the hard drive or SSD. A secondary purpose would be to speed up access to the transcode, especially if you were using a hard disk (spinning disk) for your transcode folder before (you wouldn't notice much difference between RAMDISK and an SSD.)
Hey man could you please do a tutorial on how to set/ configure your audio for plex Media player app for Windows, I have a Logitech 5.1 and my movies don’t play on all speakers, I can’t seem to find the settings screen to toggle the settings for various audio formats, regards Shane.
from what I understand If plex is set to transcode 120 mins default... you will want enough ram for each active stream to fit in RAM and then clear. Not a big deal if its just you, but if you have family watching your home movies, youll need a decent sized RAMDISK for all those transcodes at once or youll start having issues.
Not at all. Used to do this with windows desktop and the application RAMdisk which requires a painless email form. Ubuntu is easier as you run “sudo mount -t tmpfs etc.” (google it and learns) Now I’m on a server that does use ecc and it’s not necessary, but just as functional. (eBay has older servers that don’t use more than 250watts) Came here to see if anyone else is doing this as the forums advise not to, seems they weren’t brave enough to test. I literally couldn’t get my old AMD FX to transcode 4K until I configured a RAM disk. Now I’m rocking it virtually via Hyper V with Focal Fossa. Don’t make my mistake though, setup your virtual disks, don’t use pass-through as they can have issues keeping their UUID which you will absolutely need to automatically mount external volumes via fstab.
@@userhandle3378 i ultimately ended up just setting up a RAMDisk right after this comment, so I've been running 1 for about a month. I actually think I'm gonna can it though. I setup an 8gb ramdisk and i can still fill it transcoding a 4k movie... It's just not worth the sacrifice of memory for something that's capped anyway. I was thinking about just buying 2 cheapo low storage ssds and running them raid 0. If they die, they die. They're only gonna cost a couple bucks anyway and raid 0 should double their life and their speed. I'll probably just need to move a couple of my spinning platters over to the hba so i can get these on the board.
Ryan F What environment do you have Plex running in? As I mentioned earlier, I’m using a minimal OS or headless, so no GUI to eat up RAM and use unnecessary processes. In this configuration, a ramdisk is the next obvious advantage, but definitely not necessary.
@@userhandle3378 that's my issue. This isn't solely a Plex server. I'm running Windows 10 Pro. The system was primarily a surveillance server, but I'd say it's more dedicated to Plex now. I also use it for minimal video editing and capture, and for the time being it's a workstation. I have a couple VMs setup, one being for work. So all this takes away from my 32gb ramm. By no means am i capped on ramm, but im pushing the limits of comfort for a system that runs 24/7 on consumer hardware.
I just pulled the trigger on a Startech 2xM.2 sata ssd to 2.5" raid adapter and 2x Silicon Power A55 128GB M.2 sata ssds. That is way more than enough storage for transcoding, and theoretically i should be getting up to 1-1.1Gbps transfer speeds in Raid 0. Hopefully real world speeds at least exceed my samsung evos. Only concern i have is temps, but i have options for mounting. I can mount in an open bay between 2 case fans, but I'll have no hot swapability there, so we'll see. Maybe I'll try in hotswap Bay on front panel and monitor temps for a little.
The tutorial starts at 2:36
Way to much talking thanks bro
Just a note, NEVER use the Root of a drive for things, Use "R:\Transcode" or something
I had massive problems with subtitles and transcoding after following this guide. Kept getting the error message "Conversion failed". Then when I searched the logs I saw that a file used in correlation to subtitles (dont know what file or what is was, lots of strange and new stuff to me) couldn't be located, I saw that it was on R:\. After reading your comment I thought maybe setting the path to just R:\ was the culprit so I created a folder inside R:\ called Transcode, and lo and behold, it worked perfectly when I set the path to R:\Transcode.
I did some testing and apparently, after I dismount and mount R: (using ImDisk), the Transcode folder goes away but Plex just creates a new folder on R:\ in that case so it worked out fine. Thank you! :)
Thanks for posting this!
@@sinxcosx1337 I just posted a comment "I run emby and plex I'm wondering if I can use the same ram location for both or do I need to run another instance of IMdisktk? Thanks" But now I know to make 2 location names. Thanks!
@@back4more420
Use 1 RAMdisk for both. If you set up 2 8GB disks they could each use 8GB & be capped there. If you set up 1 16GB disk they could each use 8GB of the disk or 1 could use 12 & there still be 4GB for the other to use. Setting them up with different folders is probably best, to prevent any errors where one deletes something the other is using or whatnot, but unless you need to limit them & want them each to have dedicated RAM that is just for them there's no benefits to having them separate
@@LostOnTheLine Thank you
Is there a rule a thumb as to how big the ram drive needs to be? You used 10GB, but does that mean that all of your media is 10GB or smaller?
hey did you end up figuring this out?
@@jayzah These days I do the transcoding on an SSD. Loads up pretty quickly. I wouldn't bother with transcoding on a ramdisk these days.
@@snehnesne@jayzah the media doesn't need to be smaller than the RAMdrive, you don't need to transcode to whole thing before starting, it will transcode it in parts, so it only really needs enough space to hold 1-2 minutes of the video at a time. Having more space will likely make it easier to fast forward & rewind, but if you are transcoding a 10GB file you'll need at most 2GB, the bigger concern is how MANY you can transcode at the same time. So 4 people having transcode streams need 4× as much, if you have less space Plex will adapt & do smaller chunks, but multiple streams will still need their own chunk
Awesome videos as always! Tried it on my server and works perfectly.
I agree! This is working like a charm! Might as well do something with 128GB of RAM in my server. :)
Thanks Jason, curious what would you recommend for RAM disk size with 32g ram?
i usually only keep 8gb for the system and the rest for ramdisk. some software have a flexible ram allocation
25GB should be sufficient for your needs, leaving more than enough for Windows
I know this video is old, but just wanted to express my appreciation for it making me aware of ImDisk, which is awesome.
Also, if you'll only be using your RAM disk for Plex transcoding, you should disable indexing in the drive properties as it will just take up space on the RAM disk with no real added benefit.
That's just for dedicated virtual disk, right? You're not talking about dedicated sticks?
@@rfehr613 You set the size of the disk, it doesn't have to use a whole stick
@@xMxyztplk yeah i figured. I've already set it up using less than a full stick. I'm not sure if I'm really seeing a huge difference, and I'm pretty sure I had some kind of transcoding failure last night towards the end of a show.
@@rfehr613 Try running a Transcode as big as you plan on using of at least an hour. After it's been running for 15 minutes click the properties of the RAMdisk. See how full the disk is. If it has more than 5% free space you are okay, if it has less than 10% you might want to look at maybe increasing your RAMdisk size. If it has less than 5% it could be the reason your trancode had an error. I just tried out ImDisk & discovered it's missing an important feature that SoftPerfect (The program I use, which is discontinued, But as the machine it's on is not used to do anything except serve my Plex I'm not concerned) has. In SoftPerfect when you create your drive you have an option for [Hard Disk Emulation (Slower)] which I always have off. The ImDisk was a bit slower than SoftPerfect, but when I turned that on in SoftPerfect it was about the same, but still just a little slower instead of a lot.
@@xMxyztplk I'll try running a transcode like your say and monitoring. Though after i initially set it up, it didn't seem to be using much at all. I think i was using well under 10%. I just pulled it up now, and i guess i was mistaken... I configured it for 8GB, which is equivalent to 1 of my 4 RAM sticks. I should probably knock that down since 99% of the time I'm only doing 1 transcode at a time. On another note, i just saw i had indexing and compression on for this RAMdisk, so I just turned them off. Let's see how that does. I can also turn off xmp in the BIOS, as that could be messing with things.
I running a stream on 2 rokus, my phone and locally on my pc/server, which at the moment is all of my plex streaming methods. It never used more than 250 megabytes. I set my virtual ram drive to 500 megabytes to be safe. I only have 8gb of ram in my pc. So far so good. Is there anything I am missing, that would require me to allocate more ram for transcoding?
And since you now have a RAMdisk, you may also want to move Google Chrome cache there. Same as with Plex this should slightly increase its performance and save your SSD lifespan. Just add --disk-cache-dir="PATH_TO_FOLDER_ON_RAMDISK" to the "Target:" field in your Chrome's shortcut properties.
I set this up since your last video and as it happens used the same software. I can confirm that this works flawlessly. I've been using this system for the last month or so...
Ive been noticing huge slowdowns going from a 7200RPM HDD to a dedicated 8TB 5400RPM HDD. I have 64GB of ram on my PC for multitasking and design purposes. Hopefully this will help eliminate the stuttering
Wow. This made all the difference. I only have 8gigs of ram (allocated 4 to imDisk), but everything is running so much smoother with faster loading and so far, no glitches. Luv ya work!
If you are making a RAMdisk that's less than 4GB the Softperfect RAMdisk he was talking about 1st but said it wasn't free has a Free version, but limits to 4GB. (Mostly for future readers) It's a better program, so long as you only need 4GB or less
Thanks for the idea. Was battling with slow drives, but a server with a ton of RAM. Created a 10GB RAM disk, using built in virtual disk abilities of Windows Server 2012, with a boot up script that recreates the drive on restart, and this has changed my world with transcoding. Keep up the good vids!
I'm now to plex i have a file server with 2x intel Xeon x5660 @2.8Ghz and OMG I WAS thinking about this on my way home! I have 48gb in my Plex server and i was like why cant i just setup a ram disk so i am not loading up my SSD!
I'm kind of surprised they don't have this in Plex to keep it in rap if you have the capacity
On Ubuntu(virtualized with HyperV),
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,size=12G tmpfs media/RAMDISK < -- This isn't much different than the line that needs added to fstab for auto-mount on startup. That said, just grep your history for the command if you lose it after any random reboot. I always look around for my footsteps with,
history | grep 'some command I ran'
When you're rocking 2x AMD Opteron x4386 @ 3.5Ghz with 96 Gigs, tossing Plex 18G in total can be a huge help for large files and transcoding. I'm watching a user Transcode 4k to 720p right now, and of my 12 Gig Ram Disk, he's using 1.2G at 601 chunks or tmp files. A stat that can easily be observed with,
watch 'ls -lh /media/RAMDISK/Transcode/plex--transcode-the_rest_of_the_file_name_you_should_just_hit_tab_to_complete.'
I run emby and plex I'm wondering if I can use the same ram location for both or do I need to run another instance of IMdisktk? Thanks
who else used crystal diskmark on the ram disk just for funsies
Question I am a avid use of plex and have almost uploaded all of my dvds to it, however i ahave a problem. and i think many of ples users might. I want to buy my media legaly, however i hav found several problem one Google play can download to windows, FUltraviolet you have to use flixter and itunes itunes. How or is there anyway way of buying a digital version of your movie that is not DRM and i can add to plex
Ok think I'm having an issue.
-Installed 16gb ram
-Downloaded imdisk toolkit
-Open ramdisk configuration
-Set-up 10gb and clicked launch at windows setup.
-opened webserver
-put R:\ (my ram drive)
-saved changes
-started movie, but not stating transcoding on dashboard or the drive is not showing any activity.
Help please
I had to make a subfolder. Example.... R:\Transcode\
However, now I am getting a strange can't write error after awhile.
Did you change the playback settings so that it would transcode? I had to manually decrease a 1080p file to 720p for it to transcode.
Does anyone know what the point of increasing the size of the drive would be over 2gb? I say 2gb because most threads say that should be the minimum for some reason.
I just tested 2gb and one transcode fills up the drive and dumps portions not being utilized once full. I can't see the point in making a large drive like many users do, unless you're transcoding lots of videos at once that could possibly lead to drive limitations.
Maybe if you rewind to save time not having to transcode the same segments again?
Whats' the recommended size for a transcode disk? I only have 8GB of ram on my server. I could spare a couple GB but want to make sure that's big enough.
Can anybody answer if using dynamic memory over static is better for performance? From random reading, it seems like it would be, but it is also "slower".
Hi, I set up everything as per the video, I get the Sessions and the plex-transcode xxxxx folders, but nothing goes in there? Any idea why? I have 32GB RAM and I made the R drive for 10GB.
did u find answer?
Wow, you're using Windows 98?
i actually do have an uncle named bob. how did you know?
Great Video. Question if I set a RAM disk for a determined amount of space will I lose that RAM for the system? lets say I have 32GB and set a ram disk of 10GB will I only be left with 22GB for the rest of the system? Thank You.
Precisely
Don’t really tell you how to do it 😑
Can you do something like this for a Mac?
Is this still valid with the current state of NVMe drives?
Can you set this up as a hyper v host shared network drive?
thanks for the great tip as always. I love your Plex channel. BTW, I have 32GB RAM and I allocated 16GB to it. I noticed when I transcode a 4K video, my memory performance almost maxed out at 95%. I was rather surprised that it spiked up so high. Is that normal?
StarWind RAM Disk is and is windows 10 - I am using 48 Min Ram and the max on the Ram Disk is 27 gigs - I can have up to 150 gigs in my desktop & up to 300 in my server - after the ram tras coding the system now encodes at 89x times faster than normal, thanks
So if you set up a 10gb Ram disk and you have 16gb of ram. Will the 10gb of ram be unavailable to the rest of your system for things like gaming?
Hi folks, can anyone please tell me if a ram drive is still needed if I fit a GFX card? I have been given a gtx960 which is meant to do 13 transcodes so im confused. I havnt fitted the card or setup a ram drive yet....
Any reason you wouldn't allocate memory dynamically for the drive with ImDisk?
I'm looking for the same answer and nobody's talking about it.
@@tristangray8779 I've had it set to dynamic since watching this video and have run into no issues.
I set it to dynamic as well. It just makes sense.
now how do i remove it if i want to?
I need a way to set plex to use a different storage location for the temporary recording files, my main library is on a 36TB server, and sometimes the windows DVR has momentary issues accessing that SMB share, but a split second of loss, can mean an entire movie doesnt get recorded
@Byte My Bits can you please make a video on how to ram transcoding on Ubuntu?
Thanks for sharing... will be trying this out on my server.
Plex server has 16 GB RAM... using an 8 GB RAM disk now. Works great! Was on a SSD before so it was pretty quick already, but feel like it's a bit quicker now.
I just bought a machine for a small PLEX server. Dell OptiPlex 3020 Desktop Computer - Intel Core i5 i5-4590 3.30 GHz - Small Form Factor 16 FB ram with a win7 OS on a dedicated ssd. What do you think? I have an external Samsung 1TB drive for the media.
Is it possible and what are the benefits (if possible) of tuning the transcode to a USB stick compared to a regular HDD?
If I transcode to 720 p i will need like half a MB per second. So if plex transcodes 120 minutes per movie I'll need 3.6 GB per Movie. So 10 GB will be only enough for roughly 3 streams of different movies at a time. Is that right?
Hi it really worked well for the movies but does not affect audio files (mp3s). Mp3s were loading slow from before and after the installation of ram disk it does not affect the audio files. Did you try also with audio files? I tried it on android phone with 4gb Ram!
Should I leave the "Disable Video Stream Transcoding" box checked or not?
I moved my movie libraries to Google Drive and Drop Box, but now that I’ve done that I get buffering time out constantly and a message that reads that my server is not fast enough. How could that be if all the movies are now saved at the Google Drive server cloud? Also all my movies are convert to MP4. My home internet download connection is at 237Mbps. So why do I get buffering every minutes or so? I even selected the “Automatically adjust quality” and I still get time-out buffering. Please help. Any suggestions or recommendations? Thank you.
I’ve been using RAM disk for awhile now for Plex. My daughter and in laws share my Plex on Apple TV and my brother on his phone. I had RAM disk size of 4 gb and found once that’s used up during a busy period, Plex can stall, so I increased it to 6 gb which has been enough. My windows 7 pro system running Plex server has 16 gig ram btw. I may up that after getting my new sas raid 0 12 Tb set up.
Fun stuff!
In Settings>Server>Transcoder>Advanced you can set the "Transcoder default duration" (in minutes) to store (per stream.) More RAM would be the best solution, but if you don't have enough to allocate what you need, you may try setting the default duration to a shorter period of time. (30 or 60 minutes, rather than 120.) The downside; of course, being that if you fast forward or rewind outside of the existing transcode storage duration, you'll have to wait for the transcode to redo the section of video you moved to.... (Mileage may vary, depending on hardware...)
Excellent Video.. Bookmarked and was able to quickly reference key points to get a 20gb drive set up.. First video loaded up instantly with zero problems, and temp files populated.. Well done.
Thanks for this, I'm linking this to a few friends. As I'm not familiar with doing this.
Also, I get this is geared towards Windows and that more RAM is better. Wanted to mention, on my RockPro64 running Ayufan Ubuntu Server 18.04 and it has 4GB of RAM. I keep it capped to only allow 2 transcodes. It still makes a huge difference when starting and scrubbing a 1080p video. Whereas before a full 1080p transcode was hardly usable. Partially because r/w to a sd card is incredibly slow. Oh and the ram usage for it is hardly a 500MB lift for the one video. Still leaving me with ~2.5GB of RAM.
Can you do this on a Mac? I got a Mac Mini with a M1 chip and would love to do this!
Lol now do Mac!
do you "loose" that amount of ram?
Yes, if you set up a 7.2GB RAM Disk your system essentially puts a 7.2GB file on the RAM that your computer thinks exists as a Drive on your system, essential it's a VHD or VHDX (Virtual HardDrive) or Pagefile.
I use my video card to do transcoding. Is this necessary.
The ram isnt doing the transcoding, it's storing the transcoded file
How much ram would be suggested? Im getting ready to build my first plex server and want to offload the trandcoding to ram to save the SSD. Is there a particular ratio or ram to trandcoding stream?
Hello Jason. I don’t know how you doing this but this is another great video form you :-) thanks. Did you think if doing it this way you are using less of a electricity?
Your videos are super easy to watch and enjoyable! I found your channel from googling "Nvidia Shield Plex Server" and so far I have installed PlexPy and doing the RAM disk. Thanks man!!!!
old video but ram is slower now lolol i just use my nvme works like a charm
Can you RAM transcode on a Synology diskstation?
Will this work with hardware accelerated transcoding? So having GPU and RAM transcode? Will it take stress off cpu?
RAM doesn't actually do any of the transcoding. The GPU or CPU does all that work, then stores it somewhere while it is being played. Using a ramdisk, transcoded video is written into RAM instead of to a hard drive or SSD. (The primary purpose for this, is to limit wear on the hard drive or SSD. A secondary purpose would be to speed up access to the transcode, especially if you were using a hard disk (spinning disk) for your transcode folder before (you wouldn't notice much difference between RAMDISK and an SSD.)
Hey man could you please do a tutorial on how to set/ configure your audio for plex Media player app for Windows, I have a Logitech 5.1 and my movies don’t play on all speakers, I can’t seem to find the settings screen to toggle the settings for various audio formats, regards Shane.
Kind of a misleading title - you're not using RAM to transcode, you're just using it as a storage cache for transcoded media.
+CantankerousDave how is using a ram drive not considered using ram to transcode?
Will do this on my centos Plex server. Do you think 10GB is enough?
+Daniel Tekmyster tbh i havent done full testing in this yet. I just did 10gb as a shot in the dark number
Byte My Bits ok, I'll play with sizes here as well. Thanks!
from what I understand If plex is set to transcode 120 mins default... you will want enough ram for each active stream to fit in RAM and then clear. Not a big deal if its just you, but if you have family watching your home movies, youll need a decent sized RAMDISK for all those transcodes at once
or youll start having issues.
Issac Stickley . Plex at the time of your posting would perform cleanup by erasing older transcode files as you run out of space.
still works great!
I guess it does not make a difference in terms of speed comparing it to my NVMe, right?
nope lol
what i have a uncle called Bob? is he rich ?
ramdrive.sys Win 3.1
Did you have long hair in the past ?
Great video
Great video. I was hoping you would do one for windows after i watched your unraid video. Love all your videos keep it up. cheers Payne
Someone send this man a 1070 ti 😉
Another great video thank you
👍💯💯💯
Do you need any special type of sticks? Non-ECC? XMP/OC ok? I have 2x2x8GB Corsair vengeance 3000MHz, currently running xmp in BIOS.
Not at all. Used to do this with windows desktop and the application RAMdisk which requires a painless email form. Ubuntu is easier as you run “sudo mount -t tmpfs etc.” (google it and learns)
Now I’m on a server that does use ecc and it’s not necessary, but just as functional. (eBay has older servers that don’t use more than 250watts)
Came here to see if anyone else is doing this as the forums advise not to, seems they weren’t brave enough to test.
I literally couldn’t get my old AMD FX to transcode 4K until I configured a RAM disk. Now I’m rocking it virtually via Hyper V with Focal Fossa.
Don’t make my mistake though, setup your virtual disks, don’t use pass-through as they can have issues keeping their UUID which you will absolutely need to automatically mount external volumes via fstab.
@@userhandle3378 i ultimately ended up just setting up a RAMDisk right after this comment, so I've been running 1 for about a month. I actually think I'm gonna can it though. I setup an 8gb ramdisk and i can still fill it transcoding a 4k movie... It's just not worth the sacrifice of memory for something that's capped anyway. I was thinking about just buying 2 cheapo low storage ssds and running them raid 0. If they die, they die. They're only gonna cost a couple bucks anyway and raid 0 should double their life and their speed. I'll probably just need to move a couple of my spinning platters over to the hba so i can get these on the board.
Ryan F What environment do you have Plex running in? As I mentioned earlier, I’m using a minimal OS or headless, so no GUI to eat up RAM and use unnecessary processes. In this configuration, a ramdisk is the next obvious advantage, but definitely not necessary.
@@userhandle3378 that's my issue. This isn't solely a Plex server. I'm running Windows 10 Pro. The system was primarily a surveillance server, but I'd say it's more dedicated to Plex now. I also use it for minimal video editing and capture, and for the time being it's a workstation. I have a couple VMs setup, one being for work. So all this takes away from my 32gb ramm. By no means am i capped on ramm, but im pushing the limits of comfort for a system that runs 24/7 on consumer hardware.
I just pulled the trigger on a Startech 2xM.2 sata ssd to 2.5" raid adapter and 2x Silicon Power A55 128GB M.2 sata ssds. That is way more than enough storage for transcoding, and theoretically i should be getting up to 1-1.1Gbps transfer speeds in Raid 0. Hopefully real world speeds at least exceed my samsung evos. Only concern i have is temps, but i have options for mounting. I can mount in an open bay between 2 case fans, but I'll have no hot swapability there, so we'll see. Maybe I'll try in hotswap Bay on front panel and monitor temps for a little.
Cool i love You
Awesome! :D
Has anyone tried running Plex off a raspberry pi?
Yeah. it SUCKS
What version of Pi did you run it on?
pi3
This really doesn't help, unless you have 5+ 40mpbs streams, you are well within the specs of mechinical hdd for transcoding.
Nice a tutorial. It's been a while.
And shut up Jason gaming is good for you, do your homework 🤣
can anyone point me to on a fix for "server not strong enough...." I only stream locally to one device ..thx
Jeethesh Mahadev optimise your movies through plex or you can use handbrake for more custom settings
Can you make a videos for mac users.
Im using a mac pro 2012 .
How about a video for the webhooks integration? support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/115002267687
Maybe notification of who is playing what?
Do you have a Plex Pre-Roll?
+uncleskeetxxl i did