Quicksync capabilities on i3 10105

[stewart44 1]

Good morning,

I've been a long time user of  Emby (Since the media browser on Media Center days) but recently have started to offerr family members access to my server. I'm able to set upo access for everyone fine, but am wondering about the capabilities of my CPU. I have an i3 10105, which is just the 10100 with a frequency boost. I don't have a gpu installed as the server doesnt have a display connected to it, I access it through VNC, I rely on QuickSync for transcoding.

Does anyone know if QuickSync on the 10105 will handle around 10 simultaneous transcodes? Most of my content is 1080p h.264 so shouldn't need transcoding, but due to sod's law, it could happen. Quite a lot of the files do require some level of transcoding on the audio, but having seen how quickly the CPU deals with 1 or 2 transcodes, I'm not really worried about that. Basically, I want to know if I should be looking at upgrading the CPU to an i5 or i7? The i3 was chosen due to the lower TDP and power requirements.

I apologise if this has been covered previously, I did search, but didn't find anything on this CPU.

Thanks in advance,

Stewart.

[Abobader 2959]

Hello stewart44,

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Emby Team

[Lessaj 82]

Well you can open multiple browser tabs and play something that you know needs to be transcoded and see how it fairs.  But it should be able to handle several 1080p streams just fine. Especially if you have throttling enabled so it's not doing more than it needs to for each stream.

[stewart44 1]

So throttling will pin back the CPU on a per stream basis? Ie only allow each stream to use so much resources? I was under the impression that it would just limit the CPU as a whole. I didn't think I needed to worry about that as I have good cooling, so heat isn't an issue. Sorry if I'm being dense, as I said, I've only really used it locally for myself and my son up to this point, so this is all new to me.

But thanks for the reply, it's appreciated!

[Lessaj 82]

With throttling enabled it'll transcode about 2 minutes worth ahead of the current play position, which will be accelerated via QuickSync so it shouldn't be using too much CPU per stream. It'll go as fast as it can when it's not being throttled. You could try the same test with multiple streams/devices at the same time both with and without throttling while monitoring server usage to see the difference.

[stewart44 1]

Fab, I'll give it a try. Thanks very much!

[stewart44 1]

Fab, I'll give it a try. Thanks very much!

Addition : Had to use Opera to make it transcode, but ran 6 streams without throttling on and each ran smoothly. Perfect, thanks!

[Q-Droid 670]

You DO want throttling enabled for regular usage and I think @Lessaj suggested turning it off so that you could force a full workload test to keep your CPU busy and get an idea of what your i3 can do. Which by the way should be fine. On average you wouldn't expect all users to be transcoding video all the time and audio transcoding is a light workload.

Throttling does enough work to keep a playback buffer full then pauses. Turning off throttling lets the server transcode to the end of the video at full speed even if you're only 10 minutes in. If you or your users decide to stop watching to come back later, pause, or hate the show/movie and quit then that work is wasted. When multiple users are watching and need transcoding then having throttling enabled can level out the workload and leave more headroom for other tasks.

[Lessaj 82]

Yes definitely want it enabled, only suggested to disable as a test so you can see the difference in workload. Throttling enabled should be more spikey and disabled it should go full tilt until it's done. I would also agree that it's unlikely that you'd have 10 streams going at a time, but being a power user I like to know the limits of my hardware. I have a 1080 Ti for transcoding and can transcode I think 3 or 4 4K streams at the same time before it starts to be a problem.

Also you can force it to transcode all streams if you have the diagnostics plugin installed, can enable the option "Force transcoding", or you could disable hardware acceleration in your browser and that might prevent a direct play. I've found Chrome can generally direct play even HEVC files if you have hardware acceleration enabled. Still haven't figured out why sometimes it supports direct playing 5.1 audio streams and other times it needs to transcode to MP3 though... But audio transcodes like that are very very little CPU overhead compared to transcoding video.