Hey everyone, I’m building a new server to run Jellyfin (with a few other services like Pi-hole) and I’m stuck on GPU or CPU transcoding.
My main concern is smooth 4K HDR transcoding for 1 stream. I’ve been reading mixed advice online – some people say a strong CPU with good single-core performance can handle it, while others recommend a dedicated GPU.
Should I focus my budget (~$1000AUD/$658USD) on a good CPU, or spend some of it on a dedicated GPU?
I don’t know where you’ve bought your N100 but i think it shouldn’t be able to do that. I have one too and it cant do even one 4k 10bit HDR transcode.
As i see in the results from the benchmarks we’ve gathered (here: https://gist.github.com/ironicbadger/5da9b321acbe6b6b53070437023b844d), my experience seems to be the common one.
While de N100 is a great value and low energy processor for a jellyfin server (especially if you direct play everything as is my case), I think if the objective is 4k hdr 10bit it will fall short as in my experience it usually transcodes at 8-9fps.
I use QSV hardware acceleration with Low Power h264 and HEVC encoders enabled, plus VPP tonemapping on Jellyfin. I have Prefer OS Native DXVA or VA-API decoders checked (apparently this is needed for VPP tonemapping) and also Enable Tone mapping checked so it can fallback onto OpenCL if VPP doesn’t work. Thread count set to Auto. Preset is set to medium. h265 encoding CRF of 25, h264 encoding CRF of 23 and I have Throttle transcodes enabled, which seems to increase the number of videos I can have transcoding at once due to not transcoding more than necessary whenever a player has enough buffer for the moment.
This is on the latest Jellyfin linuxserver.io container with the OpenCL-Intel docker mod.
Also, not sure if this is a factor but I’ve got 16 GB of single channel RAM on it and I use a USB-mounted SSD for my cache and transcode folders. In the past I ran into bandwidth issues by having my transcodes be on the same drive as my media.
I get 4K HDR to 4K SDR tonemapping plus 7.1 Dolby TrueHD to 2.0 AAC transcoding at 70-75fps with my setup.
Transcoding of 4K down to lower resolutions is even faster. 4K HDR to 480p SDR runs at 191fps.
It’s not Jellyfin, but here’s my N100 simultaneously doing two 4K HDR transcodes with tone mapping enabled. Neither stream had buffering.
So it’s definitely a capable chip, but might be dependent on transcode settings.
Yeah after seeing this and another very detail answer it looks line my settings are too demanding and that is causing a slowdown. Since i do direct playing on everything i might just turn them down for the one friend who seems to be always on the weirdest player that needs transcoding. Thanks all!!