Intel A380 HWA & other general questions regaridng Jellyfin

[TechZen]

As you can see in the attached screenshots, my Intel A380 GPU seems to be doing QSV HWA, which is good! However, I am concerned with the following:

1. Is it typical for the dGPU to be hitting 100% utilization for transcoding a single 4k stream?
   
2. Is my HWA config seem correct (see attached)? I've double checked it against the HWA docs, and don't see any glaring issues (all other settings are default)
   
3. Is there a best practice for what a client's bitrate should be? It seems to prevent transcoding I must have the quality setting to have a bit-rate higher than the media source.
   
4. What is a rough estimate on the number of concurrent 4k streams I should be able to handle if transcoding, direct streaming, or a mix of the two.
   

1.  Yes.  ffmpeg will always utilize your GPU as much as it can.  Like a slow PC and a fast PC running the same game.  Both will be at 100% but one is rendering the game as 30 FPS and the other 300 FPS.

2.  MPEG2 and VP9 can be checked.  Otherwise it's fine.

3.  The client side bit rate is only there if they, locally, have a bad connection or need to transcode for some other reason.  Otherwise just max it out on the client side and on the server side you can set a per-stream limit.  Both globally and per-user.  Only really needed if you have a limited upload speed.

4.  For plain transcoding (no tone mapping), my testing was around 20 streams, possibly a few more.  Tone mapping is VRAM intensive so a GPU with more VRAM can handle more streams.  For the Arc A380 6-8 tone mapped streams is what you can expect to achieve.  And that is if all of them are tone mapped streams.  I haven't tried a mixed situation, but I don't think tone mapping has too dramatic of an impact on how many non tone mapped streams your A380 can output.

IMO, for your LG TV, you should plan on buying an Android TV dongle.  You will have a MUCH better experience using Jellyfin than with the WebOS client.  Also, based on another C1 user's discussion in the Matrix chat, the C1 is already several WebOS versions behind the latest.  Another reason to get a cheap Android TV dongle.

As for your media and storage, 12TB is much less storage than you think it is if you don't recompress your rips.  Since you have an A380 you can encode to AV1.  I don't recall if Handbrake supports QSV AV1 (I use ffmpeg).  I achieve about a 70-80% reduction in my 4K HDR content when doing this.  A bit more once I started stripping out the audio and subtitle tracks for languages I don't need.  And there is minimal quality loss.
Another consideration for re-compressing your rips is if you have a limited upload speed.  You are more likely to not have to transcode your media for remote clients when the source file has a lower bit rate.

Sir Dread, you're the best damn pirate I've ever seen. Really appreciate the time to respond back with all the advice!

One quick question, in your experience would I see a huge benefit of re imaging and running Linux Ubuntu bare metal, rather than W11?

Thanks again!