My Ryzen system can do 2-pass 1080p24 x264 encoding on "slower" preset in real-time. That is, both passes finish in the time it would take to play the movie. It would only make sense for streaming if you had >10 users at a time, and at that point it would probably save a lot of work if you just did the transcoding ahead of time and kept the right format on disk!
Do you actually gain anything from two-pass encoding for streaming? It helps with file sizes but not with momentary bandwidth requirements, as far as I know.
It helps if you have a target filesize, or equivalently an average bitrate. The first pass sets the "budget" that each part of the video gets to use out of the total, and the second pass has to make the best encoding it can that fits in the budget for each part. This lets you re-allocate bits from easy parts and give harder parts a little extra.
Edit: so no, it doesn't produce any of the final video during the first pass so you're just adding a huge amount of latency for nothing.
A little bit. Configured for constant bit-rates, x264 can still do a bit of jiggling on the assumption that there's a buffer, which helps with quality in general. Two-pass gives it information to do that better.
But constant-quality modes are far superior when you're not bandwidth-constrained.
Single-pass will also juggle within a seconds-long buffer. Does two-pass help on that micro level, in addition to the way it can allocate bits across an entire file?
16TB of video, actual files, not raw storage, and I need to transcode it, so you're saying just transcode that data and store duplicates? Yeah not a ~$100 hard drive.
Whatever man, that's just a single hard drive. I've got 8 hard drives setup in a custom raid. I can't just willy nilly buy an off the shelf usb drive to add storage too it. You come off so high and mighty not knowing someones actual needs.
In an attempt to be as independent of third-party services as possible I switched from Plex to Emby and I see no reason to go back. You can even stream media outside your home network for free.
