zandr 4 Posted June 15, 2020 Share Posted June 15, 2020 (edited) What sort of hardware transcode performance should I expect from a new Shield Pro running Emby Server? As an example, I was trying to transcode a 15Mb/s 2160p24 mkv for playback on Emby Theater on Windows, set to 1080p - 10Mb/s. (Wifi in the garage isn't awesome). I was seeing choppy playback, and the server dashboard reported that it was using hardware decode and encode, but only managing about 15fps. For comparison, running the Server on a Linux box with a GTX 1080, pulling from the same NAS and playing to the same client showed 232fps and a growing buffer. Am I running out of CPU? How do I tell that on a Shield Pro? FWIW, I've tried both the release and beta version of the server on the Shield. Thanks! ffmpeg-transcode-987a6e5f-05d2-4ceb-bf35-7ec419cc9f7e_1.txt Edited June 15, 2020 by zandr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14910 Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 Looks like HEVC 10 which is about the biggest load you could put on the hardware. I'm not sure how much extensive testing has been done yet trying to transcode on these devices but perhaps @softworkz has some thoughts... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zandr 4 Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 Yeah, seemed like a nice cheap way to get hardware transcoding for the odd stream that wants it. The internet is full of HEVC 10, unfortunately. The Shield plays this content just fine, and it does seem a little odd that there's a >10x performance improvement in one generation of hardware (Maxwell>Pascal), so it seems like the bottleneck might be elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
softworkz 3334 Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 8 hours ago, ebr said: Looks like HEVC 10 which is about the biggest load you could put on the hardware. I'm not sure how much extensive testing has been done yet trying to transcode on these devices but perhaps @softworkz has some thoughts... This is a special case. Normally we can do the down scaling on the Shield in hardware. But there's currently a problem when the source video is 10bit color. That's why we have to do color conversion and scaling in software (CPU) and that's quite an expensive task, even for the Shield (when it's 4k video). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zandr 4 Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 2 minutes ago, softworkz said: This is a special case. Normally we can do the down scaling on the Shield in hardware. But there's currently a problem when the source video is 10bit color. Oh, so it was decoding in hardware, scaling and converting color in software, then encoding in hardware again? Is that a hardware limitation of the Shield, or something that could be addressed in a future software release? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
softworkz 3334 Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 9 minutes ago, zandr said: Oh, so it was decoding in hardware, scaling and converting color in software, then encoding in hardware again? Correct! 9 minutes ago, zandr said: Is that a hardware limitation of the Shield, or something that could be addressed in a future software release? I can't say that right now. We haven't done more investigation on this so far. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zandr 4 Posted June 16, 2020 Author Share Posted June 16, 2020 Fair enough. Let me know if there's some way I can help. I'm not a developer, but I apparently have a talent for plowing straight into edge cases. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zandr 4 Posted June 17, 2020 Author Share Posted June 17, 2020 BTW- What am I looking for in the transcode log that would indicate this is happening? I'd like to see if it's happening on the machine with the GTX1080, either under Windows or Linux. I might just build a really minimal machine with a 1650 Super (because the Turing NVENC is allegedly better) but I'd like to cheap out on the rest of the box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
softworkz 3334 Posted June 17, 2020 Share Posted June 17, 2020 The cheapest way is always to use QuickSync with an Intel CPU Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zandr 4 Posted June 17, 2020 Author Share Posted June 17, 2020 3 hours ago, softworkz said: The cheapest way is always to use QuickSync with an Intel CPU But not on a Mac. Maybe I'll boot my Mini into Linux and see how it does. 1650 Supers are sub-$200, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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