Small Emby Server CPU and/or GPU transcoding

[BurntTech 6]

I've got a freenas nas also running emby as a jail. Long story short is all of my hardware is a VMHost without GPU passthrough. So having NAS also be the media seems fine. I'm running a really wimpy G2120 which is cost to low end i3 but doesn't have quicksync. A tv recording that is being transcoded is running 60-70%of the CPU. The plan after I already had the NAS installed over a year ago was to record up 2 TV shows and watch a video at most busy time. I'm looking at possible two phase approach since freenas recommends EEC ram, the cpu/mb/ram would get updated but that might not happen until middle of next year. I'm thinking of trying to get by with a GPU until the CPU gets updated. So my collection is MKV files for movies and TV and my guess is most OTA tv getting recorded is only 480p right now. My assumption for the future is OTA could be 1080p on most stations and alot of blurays should be 1080p. The part I might be fuzzy on is MKV h264 need to be transcoded again for streaming? If not i'm looking at next year for 3 times 1080p but for phase one 3 times 480p seems to be most of what we watch.

 

So for phase one I don't really want to spend more money then I have to knowing i'm working core next year. I have GTX 650 laying around which I think has NVENC but might not be enough? If not are GTX 960 or GTX 1050? I like the idea of transcoding on the during the recording but playing the MKV seems to be about 55% cpu

 

EDIT

I'm digging up an old server thats 64gb ecc and dual socket quad core to see how bad the power usage is going to be

Edited October 19, 2017 by BurntTech