Emby Server 4.8.X.X and AMD transcoding?

[MindBullet 56]

Hey there guys,

I'd like to switch from my Nvidia card to an AMD flagship card for various reasons regarding my ArchLinux host machine. The server is running on Docker.

Just a few questions before I spend so much money:

- Can AMD cards transcode (Encode/Decode) H.265 files on Emby?

- Are there any significant performance issues compared to NVIDIA transcoding?

Would be cool to have a few hints. Maybe from somebody using an AMD card on their Emby server or some devs

Best wishes and a great day!

[rbjtech 4266]

Hardware Acceleration Overview | Emby Documentation

 

 

[MindBullet 56]

Well thank you for that Doc, which I have already read though. It doesn't precisely answer my questions still

[rbjtech 4266]

Sure - most people use Nvidia or QSV - there does not appear to be much love for AMD I'm afraid.

You may want to post/search in the hardware section - that may get more interest on this topic rather than the general forum.

 

[MindBullet 56]

Oh! I now fear I might have posted in the wrong forum
Yeah but fair point. Meanwhile I was already tending to buy a Quadro RTX to bypass the transcoding limits that Nvidia ties their consumer cards to.

But thanks for the heads up!

[rbjtech 4266]

2 minutes ago, MindBullet said:

Yeah but fair point. Meanwhile I was already tending to buy a Quadro RTX to bypass the transcoding limits that Nvidia ties their consumer cards to.

A quick google search will get you around that with a non-Quadro card.   Or alternatively, for a fraction of the price - something like an Intel A380 discreet card will get you QSV with hardware AV1 encoding ...   

[MindBullet 56]

Nice! Thank you for your input! I don't and I won't have any AV1 files on my server, so that's not so important to me. 

Important is just a huge quantity of simultaneous streams in good/best possible quality. I'm already running an RTX 3090 and have already bypassed the inherent transcoding limit. It's just more of an inconvenience to have to sometimes wait for weeks until the maintainers of that Nvidia hack find the time to push their code to a new Nvidia base driver. But actually I think I'll be fine for a bit longer with the current setup.

I also did a bit of googling and research on emby's forums as well. The real selling point to me for having an AMD card over an Nvidia one is general "problems" with Nvidia in conjunction with my Linux/Wayland/KDE setup.

Despite that, I'm just a tech junkie and those Quadros looked too juicy this morning

Edited October 11, 2023 by MindBullet

[RanmaCanada 345]

If you want quality, do not get AMD.  Upgrade your processor to a 12th gen Intel, or even do what I have done and get a laptop with a smashed screen to replace your server.  Intel is the king of hardware transcoding, period.  My current "server" is an i5-1235u that I picked up for $120 off eBay last week as my previous i3-1115G4 died due to a faulty battery taking out the motherboard.  You will run out of network/hard drive bandwidth before you run out of encodes on an Intel system that is 12th gen desktop or higher.  Even laptop wise, my i3-1115G4 had no issues with up to 14 transcodes going, though was limited in 4k transcodes for obvious reasons.  

[MindBullet 56]

52 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

Intel is the king of hardware transcoding, period.

Okay wow, thank you for that insight, I really wasn't aware.

Already considered switching to a newer Intel processor model, but for totally different reasons. Mhh, makes sense - or at least it makes me want to catch up on that topic, thank you!

 

Edited October 11, 2023 by MindBullet

[RanmaCanada 345]

There are some detailed tests posted on doom9 in regards to this.  The thread linked has almost a decade worth of information.  Nvidia is faster, but Intel is a close second and is superior in every metric.  Though we are at the point where both NVENC and QSV transcoding are at the level of x264 slow (as Emby still doesn't do HEVC encoding, and no idea if or when AV1 will be added) in regards to quality.  But even for HEVC, Intel QSV is superior, and their AV1 arguably beats software AV1 (mainly cause it's not a single threaded piece of crap).

[kicsrules 1]

did you switch to amd ?