Plex Hardware Acceleration

[hbsterling]

For Plex hardware acceleration, does it make sense to get an Intel CPU with quicksync AND a GPU to do hardware acceleration? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

How many streams do you need at once? A single gpu will do a lot of streams already.

 

Normally pick one or the other. 

[WereCatf]

10 minutes ago, hbsterling said:

For Plex hardware acceleration, does it make sense to get an Intel CPU with quicksync AND a GPU to do hardware acceleration? 

Why would you want both?

[hbsterling]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How many streams do you need at once? A single gpu will do a lot of streams already.

 

Normally pick one or the other. 

Maybe 2 4k streams. If I could get away with just the cpu it would save space and money for getting a gpu.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, hbsterling said:

Maybe 2 4k streams. If I could get away with just the cpu it would save space and money for getting a gpu.

What system specs?

 

That should be easily doable with a higher end cpu with software or basically any modern hardware encoder

 

Also Id try to get your 4k media in a way that can be direct played, so no transcoding is needed

[hbsterling]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What system specs?

 

That should be easily doable with a higher end cpu with software or basically any modern hardware encoder

 

Also Id try to get your 4k media in a way that can be direct played, so no transcoding is needed

I was thinking of building a NAS for Plex or buying a QNAP and was trying to figure out if getting the i3-9100F would be a better path than using the QNAP J4125

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, hbsterling said:

I was thinking of building a NAS for Plex or buying a QNAP and was trying to figure out if getting the i3-9100F would be a better path than using the QNAP J4125

What hardware encoding does the qnap say it has?

 

Id really try to make it so you don't have to transcode to 4k, its just a lot of overhead you don't need.

 

Do you want the ease of use of a qnap? Thats the big decision.

 

The 9100f seems like a bad option, you want a igpu here, and might as well get 10th gen.

[Donut417]

On 6/14/2020 at 12:41 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

How many streams do you need at once? A single gpu will do a lot of streams already.

 

Normally pick one or the other. 

I think Nvidia locks gaming cards to two streams. Though I have heard that Intel iGPU's can do quite a few 1080 streams. 

[WereCatf]

20 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

I think Nvidia locks gaming cards to two streams.

NVIDIA recently raised the limit to three, but you can also unlock unlimited streams (as long as the hardware itself can actually handle them) by patching the drivers. I use that patch myself.

[2FA]

There's no noticeable quality difference between QuickSync on gen 6+ CPUs and NVENC. Plex will always prefer QuickSync even if you have a Nvidia card added. QuickSync can do more transcodes in general. Finally don't transcode 4k because it ruins the quality, create a separate 4k library for direct play/streams and a 1080p library for clients that can't do 4k. It's easier than messing with the headache that is 4k transcoding.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, Donut417 said:

I think Nvidia locks gaming cards to two streams. Though I have heard that Intel iGPU's can do quite a few 1080 streams. 

I think with the limited card you can still effectually have more clients that streams the gpu can process. The gpu will do faster than realtime, and fill the buffer, then switches to a different stream.

[Jarsky]

9 hours ago, 2FA said:

There's no noticeable quality difference between QuickSync on gen 6+ CPUs and NVENC.

That depends. 6th Gen still used 500 series Intel graphics (Version 5 Quicksync), 600 series (630 HD / Version 6 Quicksync) is when the broad support for HEVC (H265/VP9) and 10th Gen for VP9-10bit/ HDR-10 (Version 7 Quicksync) was introduced. Theres also a quality difference between 10th Gen and 7th-9th Gen with the latest QuickSync. 

 

Now is a good time to be supporting HEVC (H265). A lot of content these days is being released as HEVC because of its excellent compression, especially in the way of colors. Files are about a third of the size compared to the old H264. Many shows are being converted in 1080p H265 these days which take up half the space of 720p H264....most of my library consists of H265. 

 

9 hours ago, 2FA said:

Plex will always prefer QuickSync even if you have a Nvidia card added. QuickSync can do more transcodes in general. Finally don't transcode 4k because it ruins the quality, create a separate 4k library for direct play/streams and a 1080p library for clients that can't do 4k. It's easier than messing with the headache that is 4k transcoding.

Agree its definately good to split your library with 4K vs non-4K content....doing this he can either not share the 4K library with people remote, or can also utilise tautulli scripts to block users from trying to transcode content from the 4K library, and only allow direct stream (if he has the bandwidth).

 

But if he uses a modern 7th Gen+ or especially 10th Gen CPU he should be able to handle a couple of 4K transcodes without to much issue....not everyone wants to double up on all their 4K content. My 10th Gen Nvidia transcodes 4K no issue, so I don't bother splitting my Plex library.

 

Heres what a 4K transcode to 720p looks like on a 10 series card...approx 10% GPU Utilization & 1GB GPU Memory

 

[hbsterling]

On 6/14/2020 at 1:07 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

What hardware encoding does the qnap say it has?

 

Id really try to make it so you don't have to transcode to 4k, its just a lot of overhead you don't need.

 

Do you want the ease of use of a qnap? Thats the big decision.

 

The 9100f seems like a bad option, you want a igpu here, and might as well get 10th gen.

QNAP has the Intel Celeron Gemini Lake J4125, would that cpu with quicksync even be able to playback a 4k uhd stream?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, hbsterling said:

QNAP has the Intel Celeron Gemini Lake J4125, would that cpu with quicksync even be able to playback a 4k uhd stream?

Im pretty sure its supports 4k encoding on that chip, but can't confirm. It can decode 4k for sure. But depends on codec.

 

 

[igormp]

3 hours ago, Jarsky said:

Heres what a 4K transcode to 720p looks like on a 10 series card...approx 10% GPU Utilization & 1GB GPU Memory

 

Would you mind showing us the actual enc/dec usage? You can do so with nvidia-smi dmon -s u

[Jarsky]

3 hours ago, igormp said:

Would you mind showing us the actual enc/dec usage? You can do so with nvidia-smi dmon -s u

transcoding 4K to 720p (2Mbps)

Occasional jumps to 60-70% on nvdec..it really starts to hit the fan though if I transcode it to 240p.