fogpuppy 1 Posted June 24, 2020 Posted June 24, 2020 Hi all, I've got a really basic question about CPU selection. I'm building a SFF Ubuntu PC to act as a media server (and otehr stuff) in a kiosk-like situation. Because it's SFF there's really no room for an add-on graphics card which means I need to rely on the CPU's onboard GPU for transcoding. Generally the Ryzen "G" processors a considered to have better on-board graphics overall than Intel but I'm not sure if this still hold true for transcoding specifically. Also, there is a lot of back and forth on hardware support for transcoding on Linux and it's sort of unclear to me what the current state is for AMD Ryzen CPUs. So .... can someone give me some recommendation on Intel vs AMD on overall performance with an eye towards the transcoding issues? Lastly, I think from what I've seen Emby is still using FFMPEG V3, Is this correct? If so there is a newer FFMPEG V4 out which is supposed to work much better for AMD. Can this newer versino be used and would that change the answer?
Q-Droid 989 Posted June 24, 2020 Posted June 24, 2020 Emby rolls its own ffmpeg. For the CPU an Intel 8th gen and newer with UHD or Iris graphics. Without info on what else you plan to do with the server it's hard to recommend which CPU. Celerons and Pentiums of this gen can handle HW transcoding but if you're building (not pre-built) then an i3 is a good start and some Intel CPUs have been coming down in price, putting the i5's into a good range. The 'F' series CPUs from Intel do not have built-in graphics.
fogpuppy 1 Posted June 24, 2020 Author Posted June 24, 2020 Ok thanks. The Server is going to be connected to via tablets/phones using browsers and DLNA apps. It also has a monitor attached displaying other information (often videos). So far I've observer transcoding fairly often when access via browsers .... I was thinking gen8 or 10 i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 just too make sure it was powerfully enough for 10 simulatanious streams. Am I better off Intel for transcoding or will AMD do a better job given the better graphics?
Q-Droid 989 Posted June 24, 2020 Posted June 24, 2020 (edited) The ffmpeg released with Emby is constantly evolving and improving. Typically I would say go with Intel but there might be work in progress to bring AMD iGPU support on par with or better than Intel for HW accel. I just don't know but the devs would... Edited June 24, 2020 by Q-Droid
fogpuppy 1 Posted June 24, 2020 Author Posted June 24, 2020 Make me wonder ... Why roll your own support when ffmpeg is constantly evolving to get better on its own as a project. I may need naiev but it seems like you let them do what they do with the graphics support and Emby should focus on the media server ...,. Or at least make it pluggable so you could replace it with an improved one outside the Emby install ....
Happy2Play 9780 Posted June 24, 2020 Posted June 24, 2020 10 minutes ago, fogpuppy said: Make me wonder ... Why roll your own support when ffmpeg is constantly evolving to get better on its own as a project. I may need naiev but it seems like you let them do what they do with the graphics support and Emby should focus on the media server ...,. Or at least make it pluggable so you could replace it with an improved one outside the Emby install .... OT: It use to be that way and if broke more then it fixed. But you can always replace the ffmpeg in the system folder and see what results you get. That is why Emby hired someone that does the custom ffmpeg builds.
Luke 42078 Posted June 25, 2020 Posted June 25, 2020 3 hours ago, fogpuppy said: Make me wonder ... Why roll your own support when ffmpeg is constantly evolving to get better on its own as a project. I may need naiev but it seems like you let them do what they do with the graphics support and Emby should focus on the media server We do rely on ffmpeg quite a bit, but sometimes users want something fixed right away and it turns out that it's not our defect, but we can't always say that to users. In their minds emby "doesn't work", so we have to get involved with it ourselves.
Luke 42078 Posted June 25, 2020 Posted June 25, 2020 Quote Or at least make it pluggable so you could replace it with an improved one outside the Emby install .... We've been down this road before. It's too hard to support. Too many variables we have to account for. We'd spend all day debugging users installed software and wouldn't be able to do any new feature development. Plus, users own builds would be missing our custom fixes and improvements.
fogpuppy 1 Posted June 25, 2020 Author Posted June 25, 2020 Ok fair enough .... Back to the original question ... Intel or AMD for a Linux server ....
Luke 42078 Posted June 25, 2020 Posted June 25, 2020 For hardware acceleration i would suggest Intel.
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