GPU Transcoding (Intel QuickSync and nVidia NVENC)

[Jennice 19]

Hi Pappaq,

 

It's not just you, who are limited on geek funds. I think most of us are dreaming of better gear than we have standing at home. Fortunately, dreaming is free of charge, while we learn from people who invest more time and money than you and me. 

 

There's still hope, until the day we loose the ability to day-dream. 

[Jennice 19]

I just saw the price of the 1950x thread-ripper. 

It's one wild chip, but so is the price-tag. Waaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy out of my budget. 

[Jennice 19]

Possible transcoding or web player issue found:

 

I had a stream in full-screen web player. (not on the same pc as the server, client running win7).

Then I tried going back and changing channel.

It caused the "loading" ring to cycle endlessly (at least beyond my patience)

 

It happened in full-screen mode, but after closing the web interface completely, and restarting the session, both worked fine when normal "windowed" mode (not full-screen).

 

Can others please check if they get the same, or if it was just on my setup?

[Jennice 19]

I was looking at CPUs (cool) and at their prices (not so cool).

 

Compared to my present i7 870k, the Ryzen 1700 or 1700x would be a massive improvement.

 

Interestingly enough, it lseems that viewing TV on the server using Emby Theater uses less CPU than web viewer for the same transcoded live tv.

I can use bitrates in Theater that I couldn't in web viewer without stutter. Hopefullt this is addressed in the next release (the beta notes indicate it might be solved).

[Happy2Play 8224]

Since the Ryzen is fairly new you should compare it to the new i9's.  

[Guest asrequested]

Since the Ryzen is fairly new you should compare it to the new i9's.

Mo munee but seems comparative in performance.

 

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core--i9-7900X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-TR-1920X/3936vs3934

[Jennice 19]

Well, I tried to compare math-per-money.

 

Here in Denmark, the Ryzen 1700 is approximately the same price as the i7-7700, and the 1700x roughly costs the same as i7-7700k.

 

On average, Ryzen 1700 and i7-7700 seem comparable for gaming ans various tasks. But for raw math power like transcoding, the Ryzen seems significantly faster.

 

That's around my budget range, given that I also need all the rest of a pc.

 

Speaking of which...the Ryzen doesn't have iGPU. The cost of a low'ish end GPU should be added, to make a fair comparison and build budget.

Then again, a fanless GT710 card IS very cheap. It's crap by todays standards, but I just need it to install the pc and start Emby server.

[Jennice 19]

Are there any Ryzen 7 users who can confirm that Emby / ffmpeg actually utilizes all the cores and the CPU math power for transcoding?

[pappaq 8]

Are there any Ryzen 7 users who can confirm that Emby / ffmpeg actually utilizes all the cores and the CPU math power for transcoding?

I don't know, why it shouldn't.

[Jennice 19]

I don't know, why it shouldn't.

 

Inspired by this forum, I looked a comparative tests between intel and AMD, and in some graphics tool tests, it seemed that the rendering packages didn't use all cores/threads, as they did on intel chips. Therefore I am interested in any real-life use scenarios with Ryzen and ffmpeg.

 

This test doesn't seem to like Ryzen compared to intel in the ffmpeg driven test:

https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/amd-ryzen-1800x-and-am4-platform-review/5/

Edited October 2, 2017 by Jennice

[pappaq 8]

Has anyone a Xeon 1230v1 and could give some intel about the transcoding performance?

[Guest asrequested]

Has anyone a Xeon 1230v1 and could give some intel about the transcoding performance?

You may want to ask that here, as you're not asking about nvenc or quicsync

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/51347-server-gpu-acceleration-or-cpu-processing/page-1

[anthonws 40]

Is anyone using a dual GPU setup?

 

I'm currently using a Nvidia GTX 760 as the main GPU and also have enabled the Intel HD 4600. When selecting "Intel Quick Sync" I cannot transcode media.

 

Looking into ffmep transcode logs there's the following error:

 

"[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0000000004acf280] Error setting child device handle: -16".

 

Is this supported?

 

Cheers,

anthonws.

[libnc 0]

Did you have a build and a general architecture supportin quick sync?
I suppose not.

[lorac 100]

For QSV you'd need your monitor to be connected to the Intel GPU. There may be workarounds. Perhaps try booting with the Intel GPU, confirm it is working, swap GPU and see if it still works.

[Jennice 19]

Hmmm... If true, that might explain why I didn't see any advantage from trying QS video transcode on my i7-3770k.

The monitor is on my GTX 970 GPU.

 

I don't see why a connected monitor would make a difference for transcode (for remote streaming) though?

 

Jennice

[Guest asrequested]

For QSV you'd need your monitor to be connected to the Intel GPU. There may be workarounds. Perhaps try booting with the Intel GPU, confirm it is working, swap GPU and see if it still works.

 

For server QS transcoding, you don't need to do that. Some of these guys run a headless server and use QuickSync. I've tested, and can confirm that Luke has worked his magic, and it doesn't require a display.

[anthonws 40]

Did you have a build and a general architecture supportin quick sync?

I suppose not.

 

Yes. I've tested Quick Sync before in my setup, and it works.

 

For QSV you'd need your monitor to be connected to the Intel GPU. There may be workarounds. Perhaps try booting with the Intel GPU, confirm it is working, swap GPU and see if it still works.

 

That might explain things. Although I am able to use Intel iGPU to other things like Hyper-V Hypervisor (RemoteFX).

 

For server QS transcoding, you don't need to do that. Some of these guys run a headless server and use QuickSync. I've tested, and can confirm that Luke has worked his magic, and it doesn't require a display.

 

That might be the case where there's only 1 GPU. Not sure when there's 2 GPUs and Intel iGPU is not connected to a display.

 

I can run more tests, but the error log that I shared seems pretty obvious to me.

 

Cheers,

anthonws.

[Guest asrequested]

Being able to have two different GPUs will be dependent on your motherboard, I would think. I doubt that you can do it. I've not seen a case where it's been achieved.

[anthonws 40]

Being able to have two different GPUs will be dependent on your motherboard, I would think. I doubt that you can do it. I've not seen a case where it's been achieved.

 

I can. I am doing it right now. That is not the point.

 

My OS is capable of using both GPU's, hence the question regarding Emby support.

 

 

[Guest asrequested]

Ah, well then I don't know. I think Luke may be the one to answer that. I will add that your iGPU isn't capable of much. Ffmpeg may also not be supporting it very much.

 

Well done, though.

[anthonws 40]

Ah, well then I don't know. I think Luke may be the one to answer that. I will add that your iGPU isn't capable of much. Ffmpeg may also not be supporting it very much.

 

Well done, though.

 

My iGPU supports VideoDecode just fine. I've used it in the past with Plex and Emby.

 

The problem is most definitely related to the fact that since it's not the main GPU, ffmpeg cannot "see it" or request it. Thus the "[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0000000004acf280] Error setting child device handle: -16".

 

My intention was simple: workload segregation. Although it's my NAS/Hyper-V/Media server, it's also the machine I'm using for Web/Labs/Tests/Casual Gaming, which means that UI rendering is targeting GPU 1 (Nvidia). That's why I would like to offload to GPU 0 (Intel) for Transcoding.

 

Since I can use GPU 0 (Intel) in Hyper-V for Remote FX, I'm sure there's a way to actually open a handle to that device. Not sure is if ffmpeg and/or Emby are built to handle these type of scenarios.

 

Cheers,

anthonws.

 

Edit:

 

Could it be that the issue is due to the handle being created through D3D9 API/DevManager? And since DirectX only reports the main GPU, attached to the HDMI monitor, it cannot open that handle? 

Edited October 23, 2017 by anthonws

[Guest asrequested]

I didn't say it couldn't do anything, just that it can't do much. And decoding isn't the problem you'd have, it would be encoding. It can't do much even if you could get Ffmpeg to see it. I used to have one of those. It's too old, now. Tech has moved on. I think you're going down a rabbit hole, to find something that would cause you even more problems. Others on here with the same iGPU have reported problems and have disabled it.

[Waldonnis 148]

Could it be that the issue is due to the handle being created through D3D9 API/DevManager? And since DirectX only reports the main GPU, attached to the HDMI monitor, it cannot open that handle? 

 

The handle is being created via d3d9 (or d3d11va).  In fact, I've been digging again into why using qsv for both decoding and encoding causes the encoder to swap to hybrid (software) encoding speeds.  So far, it seems that ffmpeg is using dxva2 or vaapi for qsv decoding, so specifying the input decoder specifically as a _qsv variant on a multi-GPU system may not "work" (since the context may be created for the dGPU's dxva2 device instead of the iGPU's).  It seems the only reliable way out of hybrid encoding hell is to use the dxva2 hwaccel, but that never seemed to work right with Emby.

 

I have only done a cursory look at the init code, so I may be wrong about that, but it explains ffmpeg's odd behaviour on my system (GTX-970 is primary card, iGPU connected to a television or dummy display depending on the day).  I'm not sure how it would behave in a VM situation, since I just don't know how much the various VM implementations expose driver- and hardware-wise.  In a non-VM setup, it's entirely possible to use qsv even when the iGPU is not connected as long as it's a recognised device by Windows (usually just need to "detect" monitors to create a dummy display and specify that it's connected to the iGPU; lots of various how-tos around the net about how to do that for Handbrake, but the same applies here).

[Guest asrequested]

I'm not sure if this is applicable, but we've just discovered that dxva2 no longer works in mpv. It's apparently not used much, anymore. It's being retired.

 

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/ae7db6503b6fc6fce78d20e8afc77a5a7a0f0b29