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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have an idea if these could possibly have enough power for a media PC? I'm looking to handle at least 2 1080p transcodes via Jellyfin/Plex. My current plan was to get an old PC and toss an old graphics card in it, but these could be a great alternative.

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AFAIK Jellyfin fully supports both AMD AMF and VA-API for HW accelerated transcoding, so you could use either Windows or Linux and have full support for the HW encoding/decoding chips built into these.

I can't imagine you'd have any issue. My jellyfin box has an fx6300 with an even older quadro gpu (600 I think), and it doesn't seem to have any issue running multiple streams at once. I'm honestly not even sure if it's using hardware encoding on the gpu, or just cpu, but in Ubuntu 18.06 it worked out of the box with the open source drivers so I haven't messed with it.

Any recent intel cpu 8th gen and you with quicksync is going to be your best bet. An i5-8600 can do 15-20 transcodes on its own using the quick sync part of the CPU.

Plex has puzzled me for a while - why such limited hardware support for HW transcoding? Is this some sort of paid partnership they have with Intel/nVidia?

For nVidia that’s an artificial limitation in their GPU drivers. They’re basically saying “if you want to encode more than 2 video streams at the same time, you must pay us much more for the same hardware in a different package”.

As far as I’m aware, neither AMD nor Intel have such limits in their hardware encoders or GPU drivers. The only limit is performance of their hardware but 1080p doesn’t have too many pixels, pretty sure they both can handle at least a dozen of streams.

I imagine Plex uses FFMpeg, Gsteamer, or some other video library underneath. If I remember correctly they started as a fork from XBMC (now Kodi).

I don’t believe so. It’s just that Intel and Nvidia have put HW accelerated encoding into their consumer products.

You’re free to use the CPU to transcode but you may only get a couple of streams. The quicksync on chip can do 15+ on the lower end but sacrifices encoding quality for speed. Though recent quick sync and nvenc quality has significantly improved.

Edit: Intel has added the dedicated encoder chip inside most consumer (almost no xeons) where as far as I know AMD is not doing the same thing (not counting GPU encoding).

AMD APUs/GPUs have HW accelerated encoding/decoding as well, at least in Jellyfin. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

AMD's video encoding HW is comparatively poor in performance/quality. I.e., if you're bandwidth-constrained (wireless or internet uplink from home), you're likely better off with x264 or maybe SVT-AV1 on a CPU instead.

Nvidia's H.265 encoder in Turing (the 2000-series of GPUs, many RTX branded) delivers superb quality for >=1080p30 real-time encoding compared to the alternatives (x264, QuickSync, AMD GPU) (x265 isn't really suitable for realtime-encoding).

The only reason I haven't yet planned a concrete AMD workstation is the lack of proper rr[0] support[1] in their CPUs, and for the GPU the rather poor hardware encoding[2] that makes it infeasible to seriously stream out 2160p60 without problematic visual artifacts.

[0]: https://rr-project.org/

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-58361...

[2]: I have not found serious competitive benchmarks for the recent AMD hardware encoders. I would appreciate such.

Can you point to some independent comparisons that provide support for the "superb quality" statement for RTX GPUs vs x264?

The reason I'm asking is that's not what I expect from my experience. The main issue here is the CPU necessary to get equivalent quality x264 encoding? I would expect x264 medium profile to be better quality than any (consumer) hardware solution and I can do x264 1080@30 medium encoding in real time using ~70% of my old 5820k CPU. A modern Ryzen (3600 or higher) would use even less CPU so really not an issue, for a single stream (but it seems Nvidia has artificial limits to the number of concurrent streams anyway).

Oh no. The RTX GPU would encode to H.265, I'm sorry for the bad wording. If you stick to H.264, x264 is gonna win against most stuff, except for maybe some exotic high-end broadcasting hardware/FPGA stuff.

I'm a bit confused by what you're saying. Are you saying that it's worth buying an Nvidia GPU because of the h265 performance? h264 is what most streaming devices have the capability to hardware decode, and generally is the default target of transcoding. It's pretty rare to have a device that would force your files to be encoded in h265 as opposed to h264. For me the most common use-case for transcoding is decoding an h265 file and re-encoding it as h264. For my devices that can stream either format, I usually end up in direct play mode rather than doing any sort of video transcoding

I was referring consumer AMD CPU’s which don’t have the comparable video encoder/decoder core like what Intel quicksync offers. Building a box can be tough because almost all Xeons don’t have quicksync, so trying to get ECC and quicksync is a pain.

If it's a desktop CPU then there will be a graphics card, which will have the hardware, unless you run truly headless.

If it's a desktop APU then it has the hardware.

It’s possible, but you’d be better off spending the $50 on a true GPU in almost all situations and using it in lieu of the onboard graphics. Just from a lifespan perspective on the CPU, better to offload that work and not pin the CPU for hours while you’re watching movies :)

These APUs have 6/8 Vega CUs onboard, so they're going to be way more capable (AFAICT) than comparable Intel integrated GPUs, and in fact are considerably more capable than a GT730, which is about all you're going to get for that $50.

The CPU lifespan should not be depleted by using the built-in GPU or running 100% for extended periods.

Nobody i have ever met has ever hit the lifespan limits of their CPU before that CPU was hopelessly outdated. CPUs just do not break, motherboard / RAM / powersupply etc. Will always die before

For modern electronics it technically will be, but the only relevant lifespan is related to the electromigration of the bond wires. That occurs over ~100y of on time.

Keeping it hot basically won't matter unless it already had defects.

They have full hardware transcoding support, it wouldn't even pin the CPU to do 2 simultaneous 4k streams, let alone 1080p

You're probably right. I could pick up an old PC on ebay and just toss a cheapo card in and that would probably cover my use case just fine. Thanks!

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