Hello everyone,

Today we are releasing the UnicornTranscoder, it’s a project composed of 3 software to create a fully scalable Plex transcoding cluster. The project is written in NodeJS. The three components are:

UnicornLoadBalancer:

It is installed in front of Plex Media Server, it will catch the request and forward it to a UnicornTranscoder

UnicornTranscoder:

It is the transcoder software, it will get the transcoding parameters from Plex and start the Job.

UnicornFFMEG:

It’s a binary to replace Plex Transcoder, it will get the arguments and send them to UnicornTranscoder.

UnicornTranscoder is different from Plex Remote Transcoder in the architecture, each transcoder serve the streams by itself, this means that the Plex Media Server is not a bottle-neck anymore. Also, if the Plex Media Server is restarted, users are not kicked. Users are Load-balanced between servers depending on how many transcoding are running on each servers.

You can get all the source code here:

GitHub UnicornTranscoder Project UnicornTranscoder is a fully scalable Plex transcoding cluster - UnicornTranscoder Project

We are working on this project for more than 1 year, and now it’s almost bug-free. Some feature are still not finished such as media optimization or automatic quality.