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Comment by russelg | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to pay for Plex then you don't have hardware transcoding. This is of course free in Jellyfin.

Who has hardware for transcoding any more, and what hardware is modern for that?

Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.

So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure

GPU accelerated transcoding. Skylake and newer i3 or higher Intel iGPUs can do simultaneous transcode of 20x 1080p streams without breaking a sweat.

Sure, but I am never steaming more than one video at a time.

You'll need a beefy cpu to transcode pretty much any 4k video without hardware transcoding.

It would still be a waste of electricity.

I bought a GPU to get smooth 4k sources streaming to my devices.

Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices? Why not just have a streaming version? Transcode one time at whatever speed, then it's ready for you whenever you want it anytime after that? Not that you can't do whatever you want to do with your own gear or anything. I've just never understood the desire for realtime encoding for everything

It's simpler and more space efficient to just transcode according to the desired quality setting and device profile of the viewer. Unless you're a large streaming service or have an extremely uniform profile of users it's not practical to store all the possible variants you might need to cover the full range of devices and stream qualities.

It would be interesting for there to be the option to see what formats your historical clients do support, allow selection of a set of them to generate a best common format list for, and all configuring your server to automatically transcode new content to some of those formats. I suspect many of us have a few high-quantity or quality-outlier consumers that it would be useful to be able to pre-transcode newer content, that's the most likely to be consumed, for.

Are you talking about manually pre-transcoding to a more streaming-friendly format? Since anyone taking about issues with transcoding is almost certainly talking about 4K formats (anything else is almost no load even on 10 year old hardware), I'd be interested to know what format you're picking that retains 4K Dolby Vision and/or HDR10 with the Atmos audio and is supported for more efficient non-transcoded transfer by the Plex client and server software. Certainly some are better but only work on specific clients, I haven't heard of a good efficient format that works on the majority of client devices.

> Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices?

Because I don't want multiple copies of the same thing wasting space on my drive? Cloud storage might be endlessly cheap, but local storage is still very finite.

Also, both my CPU and GPU have enough spare compute that they can do it without stressing out too much. I also might not watch something multiple times, and I might watch it across different devices and networks (not all of which support 4k), so paying the cost of compute + storage to generate the transcodes ahead of time doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if a movie gets watched once every 2 years or something.

Really, I have multiple end profiles that are possible.

1. My phone 2. My wife's phone 3. My Tablet 4. My TV

They each have different screen geometries and even my tablet has two profiles really, local streaming at home or playing downloaded media on trips.

So I could transcode everything to 5 different formats and store it, or just transcode on demand and not worry about it.

Literally any GPU?

I use it all the time. It allows me to keep the highest-quality videos (4k HDR) for my own use while allowing family to stream it to less capable devices by hardware transcoding and tone mapping. A mid-range 11th gen i5 handles it without a stutter. Got a Plex lifetime pass many years ago and I’ve never regretted it.

I regret getting a Plex lifetime pass because it created the situation where Plex had no reason to listen to me as a customer and give up being the #1 home media server so they could be the #4312th gateway to all the off brand streaming services.

Not sure if you are trolling.

Hardware transcoding is available with modern GPU:s.

not trolling at all. i just don't think of the GPU as that. probably silly on my part, but as stated, i come from the world of expensive dedicated encoding devices vs generic parts of a computer you already have.

EDIT: Looks like QSV is the new transcoding api for Intel CPUs. My info was out of date.

VAAPI is in Intel chips: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

It represents parts of the CPU optimized to transcode video. The newer CPUs support HEVC/h265 which would otherwise introduce a huge load on a machine when done in a normal CPU.

Having the "hardware transcoder" as part of the chip means you can transcode huge videos without consuming huge amounts of system resources.

Jellyfin includes this, or more accurately exposes the ffmpeg implementation of this, whereas Plex charges for it.

Sure, it is available, but _why_? For years and years now, even low end devices are perfectly capable of playing media over a network without transcoding being required? Why do people think they need transcoding? Are they streaming to ancient video game consoles from their PCs? I mean, it was helpful when I was streaming to a PS2, but that's a long time ago, now.

Hardware transcoding includes your GPU doing the transcoding.

Most intel CPU's have an integrated GPU that is capable of transcoding.

I use hardware transcoding, and don't want to pay the 'Plex Tax' for doing so. It was pretty simple to configure Jellyfin with hardware transcoding. I use an Nvidia Quadro P400, which can transcode nearly anything thrown at it.

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