Any SBC out there that can serve as arm server that can do 4K 10-bit HEVC transcoding? For 2 streams

[jang430 10]

With so many SBC out there, is there any that can handle this?

Looking at buying a nas that doesn't have hardware transcoding.  I'd like to have Emby Server on an SBC, and it's library points to the nas.  I assume this way, when an unsupported iPad, iPhone, or any tablet streams shows, it's the hardware of the SBC that will do the transcoding.  This eliminates 1 of the major hurdles for me to buy a nas without hardware transcoding.

Edited June 30, 2021 by jang430

[Carlo 4330]

Why would you use a SBC to run Emby if your media is store on a NAS?
How much were you planning to spend on the SBC and the NAS itself?

Do you have any drives yet? If not how much storage do you need/want?

Are you planning on only using Emby in house or did you want to share with friends/family outside your house?
What devices/clients do you have already for watching Emby on?

[jang430 10]

9 hours ago, cayars said:

Why would you use a SBC to run Emby if your media is store on a NAS?
How much were you planning to spend on the SBC and the NAS itself?

Do you have any drives yet? If not how much storage do you need/want?

Are you planning on only using Emby in house or did you want to share with friends/family outside your house?
What devices/clients do you have already for watching Emby on?

I plan to get a Qnap that doesn't have hardware transcoding.  Currently, it's reviewed as capable to stream 4K HEVC, but since there's no dedicated hardware, I don't want my investment in such NAS will go to waste quickly, as all movies, videos will be in the NAS as well.  To prolong the usable life of the NAS, I want to make sure there is a foolproof way to continue using Emby to stream to clients that are weak.  I mostly use Android TV boxes, that can play the content well without any issue.  But I have a couple of iPads in the house that cannot do 4K HEVC, and will require transcoding.  Rather than having Emby on the NAS, and the CPU of the NAS revving up and down, taking up precious compute power, I figure if Emby server can be installed on an SBC, the SBC can do the heavy lifting when transcoding is required.

I've done such a testing, with Raspberry Pi 3B, to prove that Emby server can be installed, and it can serve properly by pointing storage to NAS.  Though I believe Raspberry Pi 3B doesn't support 4K HEVC, so I wasn't able to prove whether it will work or not.  

NAS I'm looking at is Qnap TS-873A, with Ryzen v1500B processor.  I have 5x 8 TBs, in RAID 5, currently using 15 TB capacity. 

Plan to use Emby in house, and on occasion, when I go out, using tablet, cellphones.  For family members only, so max of 6.  Preferably can do 2 4K HEVC streams at the same time.

 

[Carlo 4330]

Ahh when you said SBC I read "Server Based Computing" but you were referring to "Single Board Computer". Gotta love acronyms 

So I was trying to understand why you would have media local but computer power in the cloud.  Knowing what you're looking for now makes a lot more sense. LOL

But I gotta ask, why the Qnap TS-873A for $1000+ a SBC vs a Synology DS1821+ ?
The 1821+ would be about 100 to 200 cheaper and more powerful.

No right or wrong here, but I'm just wondering why that model NAS vs 1821+ ?

 

[jang430 10]

Hahaha, sorry, I should have been more clear.  Wow, that question has really just been recently answered by myself.  I'm in IT, we sell Synology to businesses.  I'm currently using Unraid, and started looking at how Qnap differs from my Unraid setup of many years.

I've always thought my Unraid is good enough, and Qnap and Synology will be a waste of money, but I really like the look of the NAS.  This time, by taking a close look at Qnap, I found out they are now using QuTS Hero for business NAS.  ZFS.  I've long heard about ZFS benefits, but TrueNAS/ FreeNAS has always been scary for me, hence I've never considered it.  When I saw it's already available in Qnap, I made some deep dive comparisons to Synology models.  Apart from the hardware being more future proof (as you can see in my question in this forum), the OS supported by Synology is BTRFS, it's almost there with ZFS, but not quite.  There are still a lot more benefits for ZFS.  But if you take a look at the hardware, it's way better.  1821+ has 4x 1 GB, while Qnap has 2x 2.5 GB.  The Synology has 1x PCIe x8, while the Qnap has 2x PCIe x4 (more flexible).  The list goes on, and I go off topic .  

Basically, I want to future proof my investment.  I don't want a 1K usd device to go obsolete overnight.

 

[Carlo 4330]

Agree but with Synology you can add 2 SSD drives, increase network to 10Gbps, increase memory and have Intel QuickSync on board so you can comfortably run Emby with tone mapping on it directly.

Running Emby on the NAS itself is going to be faster compared to the QNAP setup with another SBC as you just cut down more than half your networking as you won't have to read anything over the network (NAS to Server).  That will make streaming faster as well as all scanning and ffprobe or indexing/bif creation.

In the case of streaming 2 tone mapped 10Mb files that are say 50Mb/sec each on Synology it just reads the files off disc and streams 20Mb out the network.  With the Qnap/SBC combo you will have 6 times the network activity going on as you would have to pull/load 2 full Blu-ray rips essentially before transcoding them and sending them to clients.  That can add some latency.

So it's still kind of an apples to oranges comparison in which is more future proof.

I really don't know much about QNAP NAS products as I've never used one so I wasn't trying to dish on them but was just asking if you gave it any thought and you obviously did and know more about them then me! But I just wanted to give you a couple other things to chew on and think about so you make the best decision for your setup.

Edited July 10, 2021 by cayars

[jang430 10]

Qnap TS-873A and Synology DS1821+ actually have the same processor.  From the reviews I saw on Plex, 4K HEVC works, so as long as it's not the very very big files.  meaning 40 GB per movie episode . Going back to Qnap, it can actually take a GPU, e.g. GTX1050, and still have room for another expansion slot, for 10 GBE port, and 2x m.2 SSDs, albeit PCIe 3.0 x1 lane only.  

Noted that it's better to run it on the NAS.  But reason is future proofing, so I am curious what kind of toll it will take to the network, and what kind of latency if I go the Qnap/ Synology/ SBC route.  Whether that latency is acceptable or not. To be honest, I don't have plenty of old iPads . I was just giving it a thought.  The experiment will apply to both Qnap/ Synology that doesn't have a dedicated chip for transcoding. 

 

 

[jang430 10]

@cayars, If not SBC, a low end Intel CPU with Quick Sync 2.0 will do.  But if connection of this Emby server to is still single gigabit, it will have the same problem as the SBC above.  My shows are being downloaded by the NAS.  The goal is to house the Emby server not on the NAS itself.  Will 2.5 Gbps work?

[Carlo 4330]

I guess one thing to always keep in mind is the environment the "server" needs to support.  Sometimes when thinking "future proof" you might be trying to handle 20+ simultaneous streams for all your family and friends to stream at the same time. That type of setup is usually going to be far different than a typical home media server that is streaming 3 or 4 at most streams in typical use.

Unless you have huge 4K HDR rips a single Gb connection is going to handle 10-15 streams (or more) quite easily even if it's reading files from a NAS.  I think where network issue show themselves most easily is when you're streaming AND also moving files around the network.  This could be moving files from your download/processing PC to the server or NAS or using automated tools that download files.  These types of activities consume network bandwidth that could otherwise be used for streaming.

So anything from a duel Gb to 2.5Gbps will immediately help in this respect assuming the extra bandwidth doesn't get consumed by these other activities. Sometimes just being creative with what you already have can produce results worth doing without spending a penny.  In a system with network congestion that comes and goes you can often do things to constrain this to not overwhelm a network. This could be setting your processing/download computer network interface to 100Mb vs 1Gb so it can't overwhelm the network (more of a slow and steady use). I've seen others use FTP internally for moving files around as almost all FTP clients or FTP servers allow you to set bandwidth thresholds as well to keep plenty of bandwidth available for streaming.

So to me the first step is identifying where your network bandwidth use is from and see if you can throttle this in some way using tools you already have. Anyone with a smart switch have other methods available as well to use.

Getting back more to your question, sure adding a 2nd Gb LAN card to upgrading to 2.5, 5 or 10Gb is going to be of help but you likely also need a switch at that point to let you take advantage of this. For 2.5Gbps you might get away with something small like https://www.tp-link.com/baltic/home-networking/soho-switch/tl-sg105-m2/ or for 8 ports of 1, 2.5, 5, 10Gbps something like https://www.tp-link.com/en/home-networking/soho-switch/tl-sx1008/v1/ will do which would make a nice SOHO "backbone" switch if you don't need managed.

Hopefully something in the above helps.

 

[jang430 10]

@cayars, you definitely gave me pointers alright. In the end, it depends on how creative you are. I also suspect the same, that a 1 gigabit connection can handle 2 streams of 4k 10-bit. 

Thanks for taking time to explain above. 

Lastly, my current Unraid server (where movies are downloaded, and where movies reside) definitely cannot handle 4K transcodes. I cannot change processors as of the moment, and I don't have slot to put GPU anymore. I definitely need that SBC recommendation. 4k Hevc, 10-bit, 2 simultaneously streams, what can you recommend? Or where do I post? 

Edited July 11, 2021 by jang430

[Carlo 4330]

Check out this thread.

 

[jang430 10]

Thanks.  I am aware of the processor.  It's basically Quick Sync of Intel hence it performs it without a sweat . In the end, if there's no SBC to be found, I'll have to find one of those.  

Thank you cayars!