UnicornTranscoder VS clusterplex

Just having support for a remote transcoder, along the lines of unicorn transcoder or rffmpeg would be a good first step to let us start homebrewing a solution.

There's this project - https://github.com/UnicornTranscoder/UnicornTranscoder That lets you use a remote transcoder, but idk if the project is maintained anymore.

There are some projects to distribute transcoding jobs like the Unicorn Transcoder (last activity in 2021), Remote Transcoder (last activity in 2017) or the Kubernetes project (last activity in 2020)

Interesting, I wasn't aware they tweaked it so much. Projects like Unicorn Transcoder made it seem like you could just drop-in replace it with a different binary.

There was/is a Project for remote transcoding, the Unicorn Trancoder which might help but the last commit in that project was made in Oct. 2021.

On the other hand, there is a Project called Unicorn Transcoder which is to offload the transcoding job on a different machine. If that works with plex optimization or just the "on-the-fly" transcoder, I don't know.

Clusterplex

I'm also very interested in distributing transcoding jobs via https://github.com/pabloromeo/clusterplex. Have you tried that yet?

Here is a link to one of the Cluster projects: https://github.com/pabloromeo/clusterplex

I use a forked version of this: https://github.com/pabloromeo/clusterplex which has been working awesome.

This is not true. You could setup Plex in a cluster and based on which content is requested let it handle by a certain transcoding worker. You have Clusterplex or you have UnicornTranscoder. Both are actively maintained repositories. This does however require some knowledge of Linux/Kubernetes so if OP (/u/slacktopuss) doesn't know how Ubuntu and Kubernetes works, it's going to take a long time before you're up and running.

And if UnicornTranscoder isn't it, you can always look intoClusterPlex's implementation. Basically the same as how UnicornTranscoder works (Node.JS as balancer and some remote FFMPEG installs).

To see full working examples of this we can take a look at the builds of two pet projects of mine: Docker-Dogecoin and ClusterPlex.