Stupid question what does hardware acceleration allow me to do ?

[ng4ever 40]

I am running Emby on a old laptop, I know I know, but would I benefit from hardware acceleration and what does it allow me to do ?

 

 

[Carlo 4561]

If it's old it might not support HW acceleration so you would have to test it if available.

 

What it does is offload transcoding work from the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit).  We can do this because Intel, Nvidia and AMD have added native support for video conversion built right into the GPU hardware.  Older GPUs will likely only support H.264 and maybe MPEG2 video while newer GPUs will support H.265 and other codecs.

 

The quality of the HW algorithms has dramatically increased with each new GPU release.  Some of the early GPUs to support this were "iffy" on quality.

 

So just test it to see if it works and look at the quality.  You should hopefully also be able to see a big reduction is CPU use when this option is in use.

 

Hope that helps,

Carlo

[rbjtech 5284]

To add - the best emby experience/quality is when the original video file and the client are 'compatible' - and wherever possible this should be your first course of action to correct 'transcoding' issues.

 

For remote (WAN) viewing - H264 Video plus AAC Audio in an MP4 or MKV container @ 4Mbit/sec appears to be the perfect combo for remote (720p) viewing on any client without involving any transcoding.   For local (LAN) viewing, then same container but the bitrate (quality/resolution) can go up much higher - wifi, permitting.  If you want both - then simply create two copies of the files (multi-version).

 

So depending on how you are viewing Emby and the Media type - but may well be better placed to focus on changing those, rather than opt for hardware acceleration - which co-incidentally is going to be likely impossible on an old laptop .. 

Edited January 23, 2019 by rbjtech