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How dynamic is hardware accelerated transcoding?


biddy

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I'm running Emby on an old 4 core Lynnfield Xeon processor. It's running as a guest in Proxmox VE, along with several other VMs (OpenMediaVault, Nextcloud, Minecraft, etc). I've been thinking about building a dedicated box just for Emby since I've spread the gospel such that I'm regularly having 2-3 users on at any given time and the poor machine just can't keep up if titles need to be transcoded. I'm thinking a box a separate server would hold the files, so the Emby hardware would just serve/trancode.

 

I've seen folks talk about hardware acceleration and I'm curious how robust it is in Emby. Is there a max number of users that, say, Quicksync can serve? Are other users denied access, or can it serve two users with Quicksync and the rest with CPU transcode?

 

Are there any distributions that have a recent enough version of ffmpeg to work with hardware encoding or am I looking at installing a third-party package or compiling ffmpeg myself? Is anyone using Arch Linux with hardware encoding on Intel or Nvidia hardware?

 

Are there any plans for a Radeon/Ryzen hardware acceleration solution?

 

Does anyone think I would be better off encoding my library to minimize trancoding instead of fitting hardware to the problem I'm facing?

 

Sorry if I'm asking too many questions.

 

Thanks, folks.

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We don't currently switch back to cpu encoding if a limit is reached, no, but I imagine we will add that in the not too distant future. thanks.

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puithove

I'm running on Arch Linux and using HW transcoding on Nvidia.  I don't think the official ffmpeg package has hardware codecs enabled (at least it didn't have nvenc when I started playing with it) but the "ffmpeg-git" package in the AUR includes nvenc - I'm not sure about qsv.

 

NVidia has a hard limit of two encoding sessions per card on all of their "consumer" cards.  As far as I understand, Quicksync doesn't have a hard limit, but of course at some point you'll max out the performance of the encoding engine.

 

It would be really nice to be able to tell Emby to fall back to CPU transcoding after X number of active HW transcoding sessions - specifically for the NVidia hard limit.

Edited by puithove
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