AMD Vs Intel performance

[davedick 19]

Currently my Emby setup is a I7 4790K with 32 GB 1800 memory and no separate graphics card.

 

I was thinking of allowing family members to connect. If I did, I know anything watched would need to be transcodes.

 

I know Emby defaults to using the CPU for transcoding. My question is would a Ryzen 7, which has double cores and threads allow for more simultaneous transcodes compared to the 4790K?

 

Or is the quality on Ryzen bad, that if I needed to replace it, going to a newer I7 would make more sense?

[Guest asrequested]

This might help.

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/56343-10-simultaneous-full-transcodes/?p=549890

[RanmaCanada 495]

Enable quicksync and you will have nothing to worry about.

[Guest asrequested]

Enable quicksync and you will have nothing to worry about.

That simply isn't true. There's all kinds of issues with it, depending on the environment.

Edited August 19, 2018 by Doofus

[Cheeseburger 8]

I have the 4790K with the same amount of RAM but only 1600 Mhz. Enabling Quick sync should get you a bit more power, at the expense of dropped quality and greater risk of problems as Doofus says. I would only use that if I were maxing out.

 

Having said that, if we are talking family, I have a hard time seeing the 4790K not keeping up. It does depend on what content you do have mostly. 480/720/1080/4K? x264 or x265 (HEVC)? The latter seriously increases the risk you need to do transcoding, and is heavier as well. Client or bit rate limitations? Bitrate on your materials? Ultimately, try to avoid transcoding for performance but also for quality.

 

I think it will do more than fine for a family, probably a few families as well!

 

But I did a test now with 10 concurrent playbacks to a total of 3 other computers on the local network.

 

Transcoding settings: No HW acceleration, Transcoding thread count: Auto, H.264 encoding preset: Fast, H.264 encoding CRF: 21. (The latter two I believe are one notch towards better quality compared to default, so a bit more speed could be achieved if wanted.)

 

Source bitrates approx avg: 12Mbps, streaming just below that to force transcode.

1  4K x264 to 4K

2  1080p x265 to 1080p

5  1080p x264 to 1080p

 

and some without transcodes:

1 1080p x264 15Mbps Direct play

1 1080p x264 10Mbps Direct stream

 

• Started them all up within less than 10 minutes. Browsing and starting was speedy enough.
• All played fine, but I noticed that one transcode were running slower than the playback, and it also started to stutter a bit after ten minutes. The other ones were transcoding faster and would eventually have finished after which the struggling one would have got back up to speed. It seems that resources are not distributed to the one with the greatest need, but rather to the newest transcode if any such control exist. In reality, that should mean that Emby would have cached a fair bit more before handing over capacity to newer transcodes, as it is not normal to start that many streams within less than 10 minutes.
• My conclusion is 8 transcodes like above should be possible in normal cases, and that on top of that you can have plenty direct play/direct streams that don't need transcoding, mostly loading HDD's and network

• Ram usage on my server was less than 6GB.
• My Windows 8.1 system drive (2x250GB EVO 850 SSD, Intel Raid) which also has the Emby transcoding cache, was working quite hard, task manager reporting 40% busy. This could maybe be a bottleneck on systems were this folder is stored on a mechanical disk.
• Network was on average 110Mbps.

 

I also have "fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2" which I believe relieves both the transcoding cache drive but also the media storage drives by allowing more content to be held in RAM. After the test Windows reported 20GB of cache in RAM.

 

If you have another computer/device, you could always set up Emby on that too, using the same licence. I run two servers, restoring backups to the spare one to keep most things in sync. They both point to the same media storage, but keeping some users on each would remove the need for manual backup transfers, and would not be much more work assuming you have your physical media well organised so that metadata doesn't need tampering with.

 

But go ahead, getting new hardware is always nice 

 

 

Edit: Just checked my CPU settings, no overclocking enabled!

Edited August 19, 2018 by Cheeseburger

[Luke 42079]

Great info, thanks !

[davedick 19]

Thanks for the information everyone.  From the stats from Cheeseburger, I shouldn't have any issues with multiple transcodes, and I don't have any 4K in the mix, so that should help quite a bit.

 

I do have a mixture of media between 480P to 1080P and currently in the process of remuxing the media.  I only have a 10 Mbps upload speed, so I would assume that would be more of what would cause a limit of number of remote shows compared to what the CPU could actually handle.   I would be curious on what each of you set your max bit rate &/or upload speed of remote users of your setup.  I have one family member who only gets 1.5 Mbps, so I would have to set the bitrate fairly low, but thinking if they tried playing a 1080p video, it would either take a little bit before it would start playing or would studder.    

 

I have thought of having high quality for mainly local viewing and low quality for remote viewing, but not sure if that would end up being a waste or not.  I do have the storage room, so that part wouldn't be a problem.

[Guest asrequested]

Just set your remote user's limit to 1.5 Mb/s, and your user profile limit 6.5 Mb/s.

[Cheeseburger 8]

I'm spoiled with 1 Gbps upload so have no limits   but I came from the dark ages   having only 0.8mbit upload... It was a pretty library, but the content was unwatchable...

 

Doofus suggestion is a good starting point for sure. Depends on how many simultaneous users there are, and all other usage on that same link. Saturate your uplink and your normal browsing will suffer, not to mention less reliability and frustrated users when playback gets choppy.

 

Always try to keep some margin, i.e. if only two clients, set limit at 3-4 Mbitps per stream. That way they can buffer up fast enough, and you can use the Internet assuming limited uploading. But then getting a third user streaming will most likely make everyone unhappy!

 

BTW you say 10 Mbps uplink, if you haven't already, test your real speed from time to time, and work from the lower numbers, as such things can vary over time depending on technology and/or ISP. Broadband issues and weaknesses, especially intermittent problems, become a much more obvious and important matter once you set up a server.