nVidia's 2 hardware streams and then...?

[justdrooit 3]

I apologize for eating a line here assuming this has been answered somewhere in this massive forum... but dang I can't seem to comb through it all to find it.

I'm going to tell a story of my general history with Emby which may be boring to some. You can skip down to "--------- Cutting to the chase" to go around it.

------------

So I have the following server:

AMD FX-8320E
16GB DDR3
Win 2K8r2120GB SSD Boot/OS drive

275GB SSD Work drive
1x Drobo with USB 3
2x Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 (a bit slow but has been reliable)
HDHomeRun Connect


I have a fair collection of movies and TV shows, mostly in 1080p x265 (with a little tiny bit of 4K starting to make its way in), but I know my hardware is showing some age.

I bought a couple Black Fridays ago a Geforce 960 video card. It was before the mining boom and I actually chose it over the 970 because it was capable of hardware encoding x265 content. This card has been in a different system since the purchase, effectively being underutilized in an HTPC/everyday PC, and I've found myself getting less and less involved/interested in gaming.

So back when I bought this card, NVENC support in Emby appeared to be in its infancy. I lazily followed progress with it but was a little turned away with trying to use it in my server because it seemed that you could *only* use either the CPU with many streams *or* the GPU with 2 streams (and no offloading extra streams to the CPU). That and there was some conversation about some minor quality drop-off using NVENC versus the using brute force with CPU.

This last Black Friday, I picked up a 4K 55" (no HDR but does do 10bit color) for $225 from NewEgg. And it's been great considering the price....

--------- Cutting to the chase

... but I just noticed on Youtube that Plex now not only has nVidia support for transcoding, but will also let the 3rd/4th/etc transcode stream run on the CPU thus adding capability beyond the nVidia hardware.     

I can't afford a new Ryzen setup for a new server (too many things to replace, and too much $$$), but you know, that 960 in the other machine sure could get better use in my server if this is also working in Emby. Emby, from what I've noticed, has tended to be a half step ahead of Plex for things like this, so my fingers are crossed and I'm hopeful.   

If this is possible to do on Emby Server, can anyone link me to where I need to go here to get more information or to a how-to to get this set up? I know some interesting adjustments for FFMPEG have to happen. Maybe even get a different/newer version of it. I don't know much else though... Maybe one of the other hardware encoding options are even better for my setup than NVENC?

And many thanks in advance!!!

[Luke 42092]

 

 

but will also let the 3rd/4th/etc transcode stream run on the CPU thus adding capability beyond the nVidia hardware.

 

Hi, we do this as well. If the gpu operation fails we'll automatically switch to cpu.

[justdrooit 3]

Thanks Luke. I'm definitely looking forward to that. I want to say some changes on my end have to happen beyond just selecting NVENC in the hardware acceleration settings. Can you point me in that direction? (Or am I wrong and this is very much contained and ready to go in Emby Server?)

[Luke 42092]

You just select NVENC in the server transcoding menu. For Windows it will just work. Please be aware that the beta server has NVENC-related improvements.

[justdrooit 3]

Ohhh... geeesh. I'm a happy man. 

WONDERFUL! 

And I may consider the beta. I only have a couple of users, but 4K real-time transcoding is pretty much impossible with my current setup unless it direct-streams. This will add some longevity to my rig. Thank you.

[Luke 42092]

Enjoy.

[justdrooit 3]

Actually the GTX 960 isn't going anywhere. I realized that I didn't have a video card capable of running at 4K to go in it's place, so I spent about $150 on what should be more like a $90 video card and ordered a GTX 1050. I read somewhere that the NVENC is actually superior on one of the GTX 10xx cards versus the GTX 950/960. In what way wasn't real clear, but this should take care of my 4K trouble. I just have to wait until Wednesday evening to get it.

Even with the expense, this *should* put me back in the position where the most I may expect to spend in the next 6-8 months is the cost of a replacement HDD or two for one of the NAS boxes I have.

Thanks again for your help.

[Luke 42092]

The next release of Emby Server for Linux x64 will include NVENC support out of the box so all you need to do is enable it. 

 

Nvidia Cuda and OpenCL drivers will need to be installed first. These cannot be freely distributed by us so you will need to refer to your respective distro to learn how to install them.

 

Thanks !