Slow creation of .bif video preview files on N100 ffmpeg issue

[DrQuinn69 4]

Good evening,

I recently built a low power Emby Server (Win11 pro) with an Asrock N100M (32gb) which has the latest stable release of BIOS and all Drivers. The media files are on a TrueNAS server with 10gbe connnection between Emby and TrueNAS.

My question is:

1. When creating the video  thumbnails (10 seconds) for Tv Series, can ffmpeg utilize hardware acceleration, IE Intel Quicksync or is it software based? From a Google search it looks like it should be hardware based.

2. Reason I am asking is that the CPU is running at 100% during the import phase of a new TV Library and I see ffmeg is the reason. The Intel GPU does not seem to be utilized.

 

 

3. These are my settings from the transcoding page:

 

4. And the option to create Video Preview Thumbnails when the media is imported :

 

 

Thank you for your help.

 

[rbjtech 5284]

Thumbnail generation does not use GPU and there is no benefit in doing so as it's almost exclusively an I/O based operation that simply scales a 'frame' from the video every 10 seconds, writes to a temp file and then combines them at the end.

If you have a weak CPU (but fast I/O as you do) then the CPU is going to be kept busy.

As these are only created once, consider doing it as a scheduled task only - this may also be true for any new titles that you add - you may have to see what impact it has on overall performance (by the looks of it - 100% cpu, but for how long ?).

10Gbit Networking and any Windows File I/O Stack needs a fair amount of CPU (you should be maxing the I/O on the NAS?)  - so matching to a low powered N100 is far from ideal...

Edited September 20, 2023 by rbjtech

[DrQuinn69 4]

Rbjtech,

Thank you for the detailed and easy to understand explanation. It's people like you that make this community so great. I really appreciate it. Take care.