Transcoding anything >720p is painful.
I run ancient hardware for desktop/laptop >10yrs old apple stuff running linux. I consume media mainly via rpi4 or android.
What’s a minimum level system capable of trans-coding 4k video to x265 in at the very least real time? Is there a tiny trans-coding device out there somewhere?
Would a NUC do? How old or new to churn out 4k x265
Can I avoid hardware? Are cloud gpu’s a thing?
So I think you may not know about quick sync, an Intel transcoding acceleration feature of Intel gpus in Intel CPUs.
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/video-qsv.html
There’s information about it for I think plex and handbrake and ffmpeg in general. This is how some people do real time transcoding for media servers. But I’m not an expert. I just hope you can be guided with easier search terms.
What a great example for the community you are, my guy. I love it.
Speaking up, knowing you don’t have the full answer but can at least point in a general direction, is HUGE in a community full of constant and rapid change where the previous years information could already be outdated or even obsolete.
As the other person said, NUCs and such are able to do transcodes via Intel QuickSync hardware acceleration, it’s not really possible to transcode 4k in realtime on most CPUs without it.
You will need at least an 8th gen Intel processor to do HVEC which is what h265 uses, more info is in this chart on Wikipedia about which generations support which things. Anecdotally, this has worked extremely well for me for a long time, definitely worth it.
Also be aware if you are doing any virtualization you will need to pass the iGPU through to the guest machine.
7th gen Intel (Kaby Lake) can encode h265, also. Not just 8th gen.
Source: I encode to h265 almost daily using Quicksync on my i5-7500.
Intel 7th gen & higher CPUs have Quicksync that does hardware h265 encoding.
You can get an old i5-7500 PC pretty cheap these days. That’s what I have, and tDarr converts about an hour of 1080p h264 content to h265 in roughly 10min.
If you want real time transcoding, then a hardware encoder would be best. Intel CPUs have had hardware H.265 encode support for the last 8 years. Intel ARC GPUs have a very good video encoder, but they require system that supports resizable BAR.
If you just want to transcode a large number of videos for storage, get a system with loads of CPU cores and run multiple transcodes in parallel. Software encoders produce higher quality video than hardware encoders.
There are cloud GPUs, but that gets very expensive, very fast. You are much better off buying your own hardware if you need to use it for a longer period of time.
Thanks
What is resizable BAR?
It improves memory access to the GPU, but I don’t believe it’s required for Intel ARC anymore.
they require system that supports resizable BAR
I don’t think it’s required anymore, but it’s definitely still recommended.
The encoder engine is the same for all ARC GPUs, meaning you can by the lowest end one and it has the same encoding/decoding performance as the top tier one.
An intel nuc with an IGPU from the last few generations would do it no problem (even a pentium or i3 from the last few generations would be better than what you have by the sounds of it).
Or you can grab a cheap used quadro p600 or gt1050 (minimum model with hardware H265 NVENC support) and use that for transcoding or run an app like tdarr, unmanic or fileflows to convert your library to a direct streamable format in the background.
Why are you even requiring transcode is also something to look at, you should be trying to get your playback devices to play the raw files directly, that means a solid network infrastructure and properly configured software. If they are physically incapable of playing your 4k media then you need to look at upgrading them.
This all applies whether you are running plex, jellyfin, emby or whatever else.
It’s hard to beat a GPU in HEVC encoding performance. SoC:s have comparable performance to dGPU:s in that regard. A used zen/zen2 laptop might be a cheap and tiny workhorse for the purpose. I have a zen/vega10 matebook 2020 that does 1080p at around 2.5-3x real-time at high quality presets. No doubt it could do 4k at faster presets.
With the hardware in my arsenal I’ve found that AMD>Intel>nVidia, at least quality wise. VideoToolbox on Mac is down there with nVidia, and Apple silicon being pretty slow at it compared to software x265 on the same machine.
Where have you heard that about Apple Silicon? Not that I’m trying to say it’s better than the others, but it is absolutely better than software encoding on the same machine.
Post in thread ‘Mac Mini M1 H.265 encoding?’ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-m1-h-265-encoding.2269815/post-29606894
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/y0t4z6/hardware_accelerated_video_transcoding_apple/irviw29/
Haven’t heard anything, just from memory of my own testing. Looking back at my notes I see a 40-50% speed up with VideoToolbox compared to x265 on M1, but at a lot crappier quality.
I haven’t tested in quite a while, though. I wrote off doing encoding on the M1, as my AMD cards are a lot faster (and produce better results).
Besides new hardware and windows, here is a tool that will you can sink time into. There is a lot of things to lern.
I converted all my ripped Blu Rays over the past couple of weeks. I just used ffmpeg. It took a a while to find the right options to keep subtitles and multiple audio channels and such, but eventually I got it all perfect.
Do you maybe have the command line for it? Looking to do something similar myself.
If you’re actually ripping bluerays, I would highly recommend using MakeMKV. It’s technically paid software but while it’s in beta you can can a free license key from their forums. BluRays can be formatted oddly and include a bunch of crap you probably don’t want (preroll ads, etc), so when I tried to rip one with jusy ffmpeg it was a pain, but MakeMKV deals with most of that for you and gets a 1-to-1 copy of the movie files + anything like captions and alternate audip tracks.
I put it in a script, so I’ll need to check my server later.
Do we have a remindme bot here?
Not as far as i know, consider this my reminder, I guess? 😅
Try handbrake maybe https://handbrake.fr Might not be exactly what you want but something to look at while you wait for other answers.
If you are actively making 4k videos through, I think it might be time for you to upgrade.
I would recommend trying to rent a vps for just long enough to transcode and using that. It would be way cheaper than buying new hardware.
NUC should be fine. I have unmanic running in a container on it converting anything I add to folders.
Cloud GPUs are a thing, but they’re very expensive.
it depends, they break even if you run them for many hours a day, but for smaller / quicker workloads they can make a lot of sense
