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Media servers can be pretty demanding particularly when doing on the fly transcoding. Look for refurbished servers, big companies routinely toss perfectly good hardware as part of product lifecycle management. A favorite of mine is called 'techmikeny' although their site and search is pretty janky.
I/O performance needs to be considered along with the number of processing threads which really comes into play if you have a lot of virtual machines/containers running. Less than $1000 upfront and you can get well more than you think you need, and have space to improve. I'd say focus on CPU first, it's easy to add memory and storage later if you buy a big enough box to have extra slots open, but adding CPUs is more of a pain.
Electricity and noise should be a thought too. My largest box is using about 240 watts right now and if you go with actual rack servers they tend to be loud with a half dozen fans running at 6000 rpm or so. If you can stash it somewhere out of your living space all the better.
Yes exactly. QuickSync has been on Intel CPUs (i5 and up) since Sandy Bridge. But I’ve heard that only since 4th gen has it been out.
I would recommend a used SFF PC for docker, and a separate NAS like a Qnap for file storage.
The power is only needed for transcoding. Multiple 4k streams should be little more than directly serving up the files to the client machine (like your TV) which consumes very few resources. You should avoid transcoding 4k down to 1080p or 720p by either avoiding 4k content, grabbing only stuff that is directly compatible, or having duplicate copies of stuff in 4k and 1080p so that the 1080p file gets transcoded if needed.
Many of us have separate 4k libraries on our servers to prevent any possibility of transcoding it (like for remote streams when you don't have the upload speed to stream 4k directly). Like for example i have about a dozen family members using my server remotely but I don't share my 4k libraries with them since the best upload I can get with Comcast is 12Mbps. In the Plex settings I have everyone limited to 3-4Mbps so that I can handle 3-4 people watching remotely at once which leads to these streams getting transcoded down to 720p.
That was just an example of when you might need to transcode multiple streams at once. Typically you shouldn't need to transcode anything especially if you're just watching at home. In that case you can have dozens of streams in any resolution running at once without the computer sweating at all.
In a transient way I might say rather than constantly. I use Emby and when something is streaming to a Roku in a format that's not native it ends up using something around 80% of the allocated power. I don't use the throttling option though so it's actually working well ahead of the stream and finishes up a full movie in a few minutes rather than going along in realtime.
So yeah it could be heavily mitigated but I'd rather just have it done rather than hoping it's smart enough plan ahead.