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Need Transcoding help


sharrisct25@hotmail.com

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bcm00re

 

3 hours ago, cayars said:

I'd suggest trying both to see which transcoders the best for Emby but I believe the 530 will rule the day and be the better choice.

I guess my old card doesn't offer any additional headroom?  That is probably the case because I see it running at 99% (according to Task Manager) when just doing 1 conversion.  I did some limited testing between the GT 730 and QuickSync, and I didn't see a noticeable difference in speed or quality.  I searched the internet too and couldn't get a definitive answer either.  Some places claim Skylake QuickSync is better, and testing other places shows Kepler NVENC produces better quality.  So I have elected to put the wear and tear on the 730 card because it's more easily replaceable.

Edited by bcm00re
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bcm00re
17 hours ago, Luke said:

Right now you have to pick which one you want to use. Load balancing between multiple GPU's is something we're interested in looking at in the future. Thanks.

In just had an idea, and it might be a somewhat easy way to accomplish this in the near-term.  Allow a way to set hardware preferences for transcoding Live TV that can differ from the settings for doing Conversions.  That way I could pick QuickSync for Live TV and my Nvidia card for doing Conversions to split the workload.

 

Edited by bcm00re
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8 minutes ago, bcm00re said:

In just had an idea, and it might be a somewhat easy way to accomplish this in the near-term.  Allow a way to set hardware preferences for transcoding Live TV that can differ from the settings for doing Conversions.  That way I could pick QuickSync for Live TV and my Nvidia card for doing Conversions to split the workload.

 

Along these lines you could check this out:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg-batch/

This is a batch ffmpeg conversion tool that I use outside of Emby to convert my files to H.265 with a custom profile (many built in).  So you could use QuickSync in Emby and Nvidia in the batch tool or vice versa and make use of both on the machine.

I actually prefer the additional control I have of conversions this way.  It's worth looking into at least.

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sharrisct25@hotmail.com

On that note I am thinking about buying a new GPU that can encode and decode.  Since I run this on a 1u server box I need something that is a single slot so my options are limited.  I was thinking about the PNY Quadro P620 Graphic Card does anybody have experience using that with Emby?

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bcm00re
12 hours ago, sharrisct25@hotmail.com said:

On that note I am thinking about buying a new GPU that can encode and decode.  Since I run this on a 1u server box I need something that is a single slot so my options are limited.  I was thinking about the PNY Quadro P620 Graphic Card does anybody have experience using that with Emby?

I agree with Cayars -- why not try the card you already have first?  Your GTX 1030 is newer and much more powerful than my GT 730 (that's doing hardware acceleration with Emby for me).  Just make sure you get the latest driver from Nvidia's website.

 

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Happy2Play
2 minutes ago, bcm00re said:

I agree with Cayars -- why not try the card you already have first?  Your GTX 1030 is newer and much more powerful than my GT 730 (that's doing hardware acceleration with Emby for me).  Just make sure you get the latest driver from Nvidia's website.

 

It may be newer but it has no encoding capabilities only decoding.  

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38 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

It may be newer but it has no encoding capabilities only decoding.  

I didn't realize that, but it seems suspect that a card that much newer couldn't handle both.  For the record my GT 730 doesn't show on that link that Cayars just posted, but I found other resources showing it could work.  So I grabbed updated drivers and now it's working fine encoding and decoding.

EDIT: From what I can tell there is no GTX 1030.  If it's really a GT 1030 then I think he is out of luck, but if it is really a GTX card the he should be good to go.

 

Edited by bcm00re
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sharrisct25@hotmail.com

From what I have found there is no encoding capability for my current card.  I do believe it is a GT1030.  That is why I am thinking about swapping it.

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bcm00re

I have thought about upgrading myself.  My PC is a slim one so my card slots are like half-height so I assume that limits my selection.  I think I could fit a double-slot card -- if those are even made in half-height form.  :P I do hear now isn't a good time to buy a video card though because all the bitcoin miners have figured out how to use GPUs (and with supply down prices are over-inflated).  

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  • 2 weeks later...
sharrisct25@hotmail.com

Cayars,

How do you use FFmpeg Batch?  Do you leave it open monitoring a folder?  I want to use something to convert my recorded shows to a better format on a different drive after like 24 hours.

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No I just point it at a subdirectory with subs directories enabled and Queue up a bunch to convert.  I'm converting 472 files in a batch right now.
I'm using an Nvidia 1650 and have it set to use 2 conversions simultaneously which doesn't seem to bother Emby at all.

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sharrisct25@hotmail.com

Thanks.  I may stick with the conversions in Emby for now then.  However is there a trick to open up the number of simultaneous conversions I am not aware of?  Even with my new card that should handle 3 sessions it only seems to convert 1 file at a time.

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sharrisct25@hotmail.com

Ahh so that is a good reason to consider ffmpeg batch then.

 

Thanks

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OK if you want to give "Batch" a shot, let me know and I'll pull out the custom profile I've been using with it for you.

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sharrisct25@hotmail.com

So I have been playing with the Live TV stuff and learned something interesting.  If I turn off transcoding completely in the user profile then the same Rokus that were transcoding HD live tv channels now are direct playing them!  The direct play option seems to be more stable and of course has less load on my server.  

I would like to get transcoding allowed because some home movies etc need it.  Would there be a way to add a configuration to the user profiles that would turn off transcoding just for live tv versus all video playback as it is now?

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Sounds like something is wrong then as it shouldn't transcode if it could direct play.

@speechles any ideas?

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@cayars Yep. It will be an TS file with Live TV. To play these we remux to let the player know the runtime length.

With Live TV there is no real end time. It just keeps going infinitely. The Roku as we know chokes on large manifests. This may be why the 4GB bug happens is because the manifest just becomes too large for the Roku. That is a different issue in a different thread but similar here.

To direct play the TS you will lose the ability to seek. You just have pause and a "pause buffer" you can explore with fast-forward. It becomes wonky to rewind because the runtime is constantly expanding. It cannot judge precisely where to rewind and it might jump back to real time. It becomes annoying.

@sharrisct25@hotmail.com Do these direct play and allow you to seek with rewind backwards into the broadcast? Press instant replay and does that instant replay? Now fast forward to real time and play around with seeking. Any issues?

Edited by speechles
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sharrisct25@hotmail.com

Ok it was only a quick test but I seem to be able to seek forward and back ok within the buffer of time I have been watching.  I could pause and resume no problem also.  Longest time I tried was 8 minutes.

 

I do not know if it factors in here but remember I have a HDHR extend that does it's own encoding.  It is currently set to mobile.

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@sharrisct25@hotmail.com Can you enable the stats for nerds inside the Roku app and show us a picture? To do so press DOWN on the remote as video plays. This opens the OSD and you will see a cog/gear. Press that to open Playback Settings. Inside playback settings is stats for nerds. Quality of the picture isn't important. But seeing what it shows will tell us what is really going on. Thanks. ^_^

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