Question about Transcoding

I've seen and heard a lot about Transcoding, and I have a pretty general idea of what it is, however I'm not sure if I have much need to look into improving my Plex server's transcoding capabilities.

I'm running Plex on a dedicated windows 10 pc, with storage spaces for my raid storage, and a pretty healthy amount of ram. I manage the server via vnc, and the server has a hyper-v install on it for acquiring new media. I'm running Sonarr, Radarr, and Tautulli, and nothing else.

I am the primary user, although I do on occasion let a friend stream some items using a Roku. I typically watch via Xbox, iPhone, or the Webapp almost always locally, however I do on occasion stream remotely to my phone if I forgot to sync something. So far I haven't really had any issues with the media playback (Although an occasional file may hiccup, if it was a bad encode or something.) Most of my files are MKV, however I have a few M4V, MP4, and AVI. Most of my media is 720 or 1080. I don't run anything 4k simply because I'm going for a larger library and want to save the space. Plus, to be honest, I'm perfectly content with 720 most of the time.

The video is being handled onboard via the AMD Ryzen 5 cpu with Radeon Vega Graphics built in. So the question is do I need to bother with a dedicated Video Card for Transcoding? Is there much of a benefit there, or am I fine since I'm not sharing out to a large number of users? If I should get a video card, what's the more common, and cost effective recommendations? I tried looking over the Transcoding Cheat Sheet, but honestly it was a bit over my head.

If I do get a video card, do I just drop it in and I'm good to go, or is there any configuration needed? How do I determine how many simultaneous streams I need? In some of the previous threads I've seen talk about a unlocked driver I would need?

Submitted by QuietThunder2014 | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016