Questions about the service

Posted January 17th, 2024 383 1

I have some questions as follows, hope to be answered
- Which countries are your servers located in? Are they in Singapore?
- What is the speed of your server? If I put a plex server on here, how many devices can I connect at the same time assuming I am using your smallest package?
- Is bandwidth really unlimited?
- I see some packages with the 4K icon in Plex, so does 4K here support transcoding directly on the server or just streaming? Do lower packages support this 4K?
Hope to get your answer

3 Replies

angoikon

Staff

10 months

Accept Answer

Hi!
Our servers are located in the Netherlands.
We have a 20GBps uplink/downlink per server, which means that you will always have available bandwidth for your actions.
Your are the administrator of your plex server, so you can add as many users as you want. Direct streaming uses little CPU so you can have quite a lot of streams (unfortunately we can't give you exact numbers as there are a lot of factors involved). However, if the plex clients of some users simultaneously request from the plex server to transcode, Bat Box won't be able to handle e.g. 2x 1080p transcodes, which means you will have to get a better tier seedbox. It is always best to direct stream, so you need to instruct your users on how to do so.
The traffic (you probably meant that instead of bandwidth) is indeed unlimited, you can find more info here.
4K icon is used for plex server transcoding, in case the plex client can't stream directly. The Vampire box is the starting package for regular 4K transcoded content (meaning not very high bitrate with special audio/video codecs).
The Bat Box can of course direct stream 4K content, but -as implied- won't be able to do so if 4K needs to be transcoded

DuyAnh

10 months

Accept Answer

For the Vampire Box package, it is possible to transcode 4K content directly on the server without transmitting it directly to the user, right? If it is indeed transcoding on the server, I want to know the maximum the server can transcode at the same time. How many movies are on plex

angoikon

Staff

10 months

Accept Answer

You have misunderstood the transcoding/direct process.
The plex client (via the user) requests from the server to stream some content. If that content is "understandable" (supported) from the plex client (in terms of resolution, codecs, format etc), then the plex server simply sends the (direct) stream to the plex client.
If the client however doesn't support it, then it sends to the plex server a request for the content to be transcoded in order to be "understandable". The plex server receives the request, transcodes the content (on the fly) and sends the transcoded stream to the plex client.
You can't force the server to preemptively transcode something as it doesn't know exactly what "settings" to use.

However, the one thing you can do is to "optimize" the version of a single movie or episode. This will indeed create another version (file) of the same content which will be optimized for e.g. TV viewing. Then the user can (note: MUST) pick which version he wants to stream.
This is not optimal though since -apart from the user that must pick the correct version- you will be forced to do the optimization for every single content since there are numerous optimizations (e.g. for TV, for mobile etc) which means occupying more disk space. Plus, the optimization is a bit time-consuming, depending on the version and/or the size of the original file.

The best solution is to download in formats that are widely supported by many plex clients, in order to avoid transcoding or optimizing versions.
This means mp4 container (note: not file extension, file container. These are separate things) with h264 video codec and aac audio codec.

You can find some very useful information here