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How can I improve transcoding?


TikiShack

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rbjtech

It wouldn't hurt to upgrade your GPU anyways. Keep your eye out for a used Nvidia GTX 1050. You should be able to find less than $100 depending on your local market. That should be plenty for what you are asking to do.

Personally I think your CPU will be too weak to feed your new GPU decode/transcode data, so my view is you need to forget about transcoding and fix the source files so they stream without needing transcoding.  As an example, I have no GPU acceleration at all on my main system, it runs an ancient Gen 1 i5 and can easily handle 6-8 streams of decent bitrate 1080p and barely hits 1-2% cpu.  The reason it can do this is I have h264 video and AAC primary audio, with SRT subs as required - all stream friendly - so no transcoding is required.

 

Anyway - get your system back together and we can go from there  ..  :)

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TikiShack

Personally I think your CPU will be too weak to feed your new GPU decode/transcode data, so my view is you need to forget about transcoding and fix the source files so they stream without needing transcoding.  As an example, I have no GPU acceleration at all on my main system, it runs an ancient Gen 1 i5 and can easily handle 6-8 streams of decent bitrate 1080p and barely hits 1-2% cpu.  The reason it can do this is I have h264 video and AAC primary audio, with SRT subs as required - all stream friendly - so no transcoding is required.

 

Anyway - get your system back together and we can go from there  ..  :)

I guess I’m not understanding when and why transcoding happens. Is it when the movie is encoded using audio and/or video codecs that Roku doesn’t support? Or because bitrates are too high? Why would it transcode, in general, rather than just stream?
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Guest asrequested

I guess I’m not understanding when and why transcoding happens. Is it when the movie is encoded using audio and/or video codecs that Roku doesn’t support? Or because bitrates are too high? Why would it transcode, in general, rather than just stream?

 

This might help

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/48799-direct-play-vs-direct-streaming-vs-transcoding/

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TikiShack

@@rbjtech - Thank you for talking me out of getting a video card! Now that I’m sitting down to put my server back together, I realize that all 3 of my expansion slots are filled with drive controllers! In order to add a video card, I would have had to lose 4 drives!

 

If I DO end up upgrading the motherboard and CPU, I’ll need to be carefully select a motherboard with enough SATA connectors and PCIe slots to handle all my drives (12 + system drive + BD-ROM).

 

For now, reencoding or reripping is definitely the best path forward for me. Eventually, I’ll upgrade my projector to 4K and I’ll want to be able to rip/stream/serve 4K/UHD Blu-ray Discs (I made sure I bought a ‘4K friendly’ BD drive) but for now I’m 100% 1080P (actually, I still have a lot of DVD rips, too!) so getting everything reencoded/reripped (I’ll be setting up Automatic Ripping Machine) so that I (and my friends & family) can stream them without transcoding is exactly what I need to do.

 

Thanks, everyone, so very much, for helping me understand what’s going on, here, and leading me to the best solution! I’ll post back when I find something that doesn’t want to stream properly.

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TikiShack

You need better controllers.

Yes, I do. And a better motherboard and CPU and DDR4 RAM and newer drives. And a better job that provides me with a lot more discretionary income.
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Guest asrequested

Yes, I do. And a better motherboard and CPU and DDR4 RAM and newer drives. And a better job that provides me with a lot more discretionary income.

 

lol... well, yeah :)

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  • 1 month later...

Your processor link is not working for me, but I have the same motherboard with a 5350....and it is severely lacking for transcoding. I ended up moving emby over to a slightly beefier laptop and leaving the Kabini as a file server.

I went down the same path as you, first experimenting with a 710 1GB card. I ended up passing through the nvidia device to a testing emby container, and video transcoding worked great. The quality was acceptable, and the machine was more than capable of "feeding" the GPU. I patched the nvidia drivers to allow more than 2 transcodes and the 710 was able to handle 4 video transcodes.

 

The issue, however, is audio transcoding. Much of my use is LiveTV, and emby needs to transcode the audio from my HDhomerun using the CPU. Things got dicey after just one transcode, and I had to conclude the processor was simply inadequate. Again, I ran 4 transcodes using ffmpeg directly with video only and the board/cpu/gpu were fine.

 

Now this was also having to transcode surround down to stereo, so if your audio tracks are better suited for direct play you should have more luck with this combo.

 

Why emby chooses the first audio stream @ 384kb/s rather than another stereo stream included in the mpeg-ts is another issue entirely. 

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  • 1 month later...
syadnom

I'll reiterate as a general case:

 

- get your media in a direct-play format whenever possible.  

- standardize on 1 type of client device specifically so you can encode to match direct-play needs.

- use subtitle plugin as mentioned above and let your player handle srt files without transcoding.

 

I would say that most content you have at home should be converted.  I use handbrake and encode everything so I'm direct playing virtually all stored content.

 

OTA TV though.... that's my challenge.

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