Plex is one of the best media stream clients. You can host the server locally in your network and stream to any of your devices. One of the benefits of Plex is the ability to transcode the video on the server and stream it to the client. Doing so utilizes the server resources and lets you stream many media formats to different clients.
Transcoding will use some space on the server as a temporary storage for transcoded items. There are several options for transcode storage:
- HDD
- SDD
- RAM
Using HDD is the slowest of all. Using SSD for transcoding will reduce its lifespan. For this reasons I prefer to use RAM if space allows. For default 60 seconds transcoding and 4k video Plex needs around 2GB of storage. For 1080p it is around 500GB.
Setting transcodes it very easy for linux-based systems. You need to go to your server settings and choose /dev/shm as a transcoding location. /dev/shm is a temporary file storage filesystem that uses RAM for the storage.
If you are using docker to run Plex server, then instead of changing transcoding location in your Plex settings, you need to map host /dev/shm to docker /transcode directory. /transcode should be the default directory for Plex docker image plexinc/pms-docker.
After making this changes, you can start playing the video and verify using free -h that the RAM is used for transcoding.