Old Client Hardware Choking on 4K x265 Content; Cheap Upgrade Ideas?

[marktaff 10]

My setup works fine on direct play 1080p x265 content, but drops frames like crazy on 4K x265 content.  The client is an ~10 year old Intel NUC *without* hardware decoding for x265.  It is paired with a ~10 year old LG 1080p TV.  The cpu spins out of control trying to keep up with the decoding and downscaling.  For now, I've told emby-theater to limit content to 1080p @ 10 Mbps which forces the server to transcode to x264 1080p @ 10Mbps.  That works, but anything above that is too much for the Intel NUC.  There isn't an emby software client for the LG TV--I think the TV is too old for the current emby LG client.  So, I'm looking for an inexpensive hardware client to use instead of the Intel NUC.

I'm looking at an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. Does anyone have experience with that?  Does it have an emby-theater app? And will it handle 4K x265 at 15-20 Mbps, decoding and downscaling it to 1080p?  It seems like it should, but it also seems too good to be true that a $55 tiny piece of hardware can be so much better than my admittedly old Intel NUC.

Thanks for your insight.

[Luke 37068]

Hi, the Nvidia Shield is also a great choice.

[marktaff 10]

Thanks, Luke, I appreciate the help.

[RanmaCanada 345]

I have a 4k max along with a few other Amazon devices, and the 4k Max can handle pretty much anything but hi10p (nothing can).  The problem with the downscaling and conversion would be on your server, not the client.  The server looks at what the client can do, and then changes the format of the media to fit whatever the client has the capabilities of.  If your TV does not have 4k HDR, the stick won't be the one doing the downscaling and tone mapping, the server will.  All I can say is if your TV does not have those capabilities, don't play those files.  Yes people feel they are entitled to watch them because they have them, but seriously, 4k should never be downscaled and tone mapped as you will never get what the intended picture is.  I would check with whomever hosts your server, if it's not you, to see if it's powerful enough to handle 4k HDR transcodes with tone mapping.

My server is a laptop with an i3-8130u that uses a mere 15 watts and can handle about 3 4k HDR transcodes with tone mapping before it throws up and explodes.  It can easily handle 20+ non 4k transcodes.

[marktaff 10]

Thanks.  My server is a beast; it could easily handle transcoding 4K x265 @24Mbps to 1080p x264 @10Mbps.  The problem was my old client (an old i5 Intel NUC, too old to have hardware decoding for x265), can't handle 1080p x264  at greater than 10Mbps, nor could it handle 4K x265 @24Mbps via Direct Play.  I am happy to report the 4K Max is able to decode and downscale 4K x265 @24Mbps to 1080p via Direct Play, and the picture looked great.  This is good, as the server has plenty to do to keep it busy without adding play-time transcoding to its chores.  Heck, just the weekly ZFS scrub takes about 36 hours. This is the last TV I own that isn't 4K, and I think this 4K Max will serve me well until I am ready to replace the TV.

I did have to upgrade my wifi, as there was almost no signal in the bedroom, and the 4K Max is wifi-only (stock).  I replaced my old Linksys WiFi 4 router with a TP-Link Deco AX3000 WiFi 6 Mesh System(Deco X55) with three routers, so now I have great wifi everywhere.  The only note there is that the Deco X55 doesn't have a real DNS server, just a forward-only DNS server.  So on Linux, you can't access local machines via 'hostname', you have to use 'hostname.local', via mDNS.  The workaround is to just put the hosts you care about in each machine's /etc/hosts file.  I only have 5 machines I regularly shell into, so it wasn't too tedious of a solution.

Thanks for your support, guys.  I appreciate it.