Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Congrats? I'm running my Plex server on enterprise hardware. There's no onboard gpu for decoding because that's not the purpose of that hardware. I do have a graphics card in there to do transcodes, and intimately monitor that usage. My original statement still holds. "which could be a problem if you’re CPU limited or have no GPU for hardware transcoding."

Transcoding may not be that accessible/useful for some people. I'd rather waste some drive space than do transcodes for every user, but that's because I have 400TB(not a typo) of space but don't have enough space to put in any card that takes up more than 1pci slot. In my mind throwing another 20TB drive into my configuration is easier and cheaper than transcoding. In a couple of years we're going to be having this discussion for AV1 anyway.

Edit: Oh, and 3-4 streams at 60fps, isn't enough description... really doesn't cover the most taxing part of the transcode process, which is resolution. 3-4 1080p streams is much easier than even 1-2 4k streams. Considering that content is trending towards higher resolutions rather than higher framerates, I'm not sure what you're getting at. My T600 can do 3-4 4k streams before it starts running into problems. That should be something like 15-16 1080p streams. Considering my library, I'd still rather have the drives in a more accessible format that will direct play on more devices than transcode my 60-100mbps 4k videos. Keep the transcoding for those that really need it rather than making it the default answer.