Setting up a deticated GPU for transcoding / Hardware acceleration

[RobertUnger]

Weren't you running Truenas scale? Truenas use ZFS, which loves RAM for caching.

I know that, but RAM, at the time, loves my wallet.... and that is not as big as i would like it to be  
I paid 300€ for 32GB CL40 6000MHz   And trust me if i say.... these sticks where the chepest i could find at that time. You could find cheaper sticks but they had a set delivery time of over 1 month. Even my sticks had a delivery time of 5-10 days.

Btw., i started a retour of the B580. I'm now thinking about buying A310 or A380. Moneywise the A310 costs about 105€ and the A380 about 125€. Would it be wise to buy the A380?


Your tipps regarding the ram and cpu usage during the transcode....
I tried it and opend 3 browser windows and played the same 4kuhd hdr atmos movie. It worked better then expected. I could watch all 3 movies. I didn't let them run long enough but i would say, 2 movies i can watch 100%. maybe the rewind or the fastforward could be problematic besides that,i would say it works.



I did not set anything up right now. I will follow your tipps if i have the new gpu and figured out all other nonsense.

[ArneR]

Weren't you running Truenas scale? Truenas use ZFS, which loves RAM for caching.

I know that, but RAM, at the time, loves my wallet.... and that is not as big as i would like it to be  
I paid 300€ for 32GB CL40 6000MHz   And trust me if i say.... these sticks where the chepest i could find at that time. You could find cheaper sticks but they had a set delivery time of over 1 month. Even my sticks had a delivery time of 5-10 days.

Btw., i started a retour of the B580. I'm now thinking about buying A310 or A380. Moneywise the A310 costs about 105€ and the A380 about 125€. Would it be wise to buy the A380?


Your tipps regarding the ram and cpu usage during the transcode....
I tried it and opend 3 browser windows and played the same 4kuhd hdr atmos movie. It worked better then expected. I could watch all 3 movies. I didn't let them run long enough but i would say, 2 movies i can watch 100%. maybe the rewind or the fastforward could be problematic besides that,i would say it works.

https://i.imgur.com/gcBIC9w.png

I did not set anything up right now. I will follow your tipps if i have the new gpu and figured out all other nonsense.

RAM prices have really gone crazy lately, you picked a bad time to build a home server.  

€20 is not that much more, but in reality all you're getting is 2GB more VRAM, and I don't know if that is even something that you will notice. 
I'd concern myself with getting the card with the smallest footprint, my A310 is low profile, with both types of brackets included. This leaves me with the option of reusing it in a small form factor jellyfin server at a later point in time. There are also a version which is only one slot wide, which could be beneficial if space is a constraint e.g. needs more PCIe devices in the same computer.

A310 (and presumably A380, I don't remember) is <75w, meaning it won't need additional power from the PSU: Less power wasted, less noise and heat. Electricity prices in Europe has gone crazy lately, so for many that is a huge concern. The iGPU will use even less than an Arc dedicated GPU though, so you might want to think about if you really need it, or if you could afford to be without it.

Speaking to that of just staying with the iGPU: Do you have a movie with even higher bitrate? Like a remux (pure source rip) of an UHD BluRay? It would be useful to see what performance number the UHD770 with its 2 media engines is capable of. 
For comparison, this is an 11600k with UHD750 (1 media engine) transcoding Dune (2021):

   

And for clarity, when you say you didn't set anything up, you're referring to the transcode settings in jellyfin it self, but you have set up the container in Truenas with my recommended values for RAM allocation?

[RobertUnger]

And for clarity, when you say you didn't set anything up, you're referring to the transcode settings in jellyfin it self, but you have set up the container in Truenas with my recommended values for RAM allocation?

No i'm referring to this...

I transcode to a temporary directory created in RAM on my server since I have so much of it, and after some testing I found that throttling after three minutes and deleting segments 5 minutes after they have been played works fine for me, I also have allocated 30GiB of RAM for this directory, since a single 4K HDR movie can use quite a lot unless throttled etc.

I forgott.... I had setup the transcoding directory in RAM but changed it later to temp directory on disk because of my missing RAM. At this time i had just 16GB. Now i have the full 32GB RAM i was talking about.

And the nonsense.... i have to figure out some networking stuff. Since the truenas is running i have problems with embedded videos. First i thought it is the pihole app i was setting up next to jellyfin. Today i deleted it because it got me in more trouble i can handle for now. But the embeded videos are still unplayable. So it has to be the server itself.
I'm a bit worried that i will loos all my media if i tool around to much and loosse the query to the directory or something. 12TB worth of movies and tv shows take almost 2 nights to copy.

Do you have a movie with even higher bitrate?

I dont think so, because after a rip i compress those files with handbrake. compressing from 80GB to about 12GB is a huge space saver. Also, Ballerina is the newest movie i have. So, unless i rip a movie again for testing porposes, i don't think i have one with more bit-rate. but i can take a look, maybe i find one.

got one.... but it is unlikely that i have one with a higher bit-rate. As long as i don't skipp forward or something it runs fine


Regarding the GPU... i will order a A310. I hate it if i have to waite if i want to skipp