Hey everyone! I'm getting ready to build my first dedicated Plex server, I've been frantically googling but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how Transcoding works.

As a background I'm currently using my main PC which has a 5800x and a 3070. I'm a bit of a quality whore so all of my content is basically 4k bluerays generally around 20mpbs.

I read hardware transcoding looses a bit of quality so I'd like to stick with software if possible and I don't mind throwing some money at it but I read someone say a threadripper could only do 1-2 4k streams at a time and I'm definitely not throwing that kind of money at it. I decided to do a little test, turn hardware transcoding off, turn everything to max and play a pretty high quality movie on my tv. I checked task manager and my cpu utilization was at 0%?

Now I'm just totally confused, have no idea if software transcoding for a reasonable price is possible and have no idea what hardware I should be looking at. Any help would be greatly appreciated