So, got my server rebuilt and am ready to test out emby again.
New system is running on an i5 6600k, so has quicksync available. Yay!
I'm running Proxmox on the bare metal to handle vm's.
I'm running Emby on a Debian 8 container, pretty vanilla install (just added repo, apt-get update, apt-get install).
Went thru settings & set transcode to Intel Quick Sync explicitly.
inxi says this about my video card in the container:
Graphics: Card: Intel Device 1912 bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:1912
Display Server: N/A driver: N/A tty size: 204x59 Advanced Data: N/A for root
So it seems it should work (assuming Linux support is there - the 20+pages of the big thread are . . . hard to follow.
thanks guys!