Intel Arc A380

[N3ttX_D]

Hi hello!
I'm running my Jellyfin server on a standalone desktop now, but I will be migrating it to my virtualized environment soon. With that, I'd love to switch to A380, so I can use AV1 codec for my videos, since it is much more storage efficient (small drives gang) and bandwidth efficient. The setup will have Proxmox VE as the hypervisor, and latest Debian Bookworm for the VM in which Jellyfin will be running. The GPU will be passed through to the VM. I was running Jellyfin with Nvidia card like this for a while before going bare metal, and it worked without any issue.

My question now is, before I pull the trigger on the A380, is there anyone with Intel Arc in their Jellyfin servers? How is the compatibility (obviously latest kernel and ffmpeg etc, versions would be helpful)? Do you leverage the AV1 features, and if so, how it performs?

Any input much appreciated

[Host-in-the-Shell]

I made a post about it a while ago that you can give a read to if you like. So far I'm happy with it, but I did had to jump through some hoops to get the card working on Bookworm.

[N3ttX_D]

Cool, the search feature works exceptionally terribly in this forum, so I've missed that post, even when I've searched specifically for "a380" lol.

Anyways, going through some hoops is not a huge deal, my job is a sysadmin so some workarounds should not be a huge issue. From the post tho, it seems that running something less.. "stable" is a way to go, like Arch that someone mentioned there, or heck, even Ubuntu. Enabling stuff in BIOS should be fine, tho not sure if X99 platform and my CPU supports it all, but that's my problem. Other than that, very happy to see that you've got it working and you're happy with it. Convinced me to pull a trigger on it, currently it's on 11% discount in local pc part store so.. it should be a very decent upgrade to the GTX960 I currently have in there.

Thank you Host in the Shell, also nice nickname

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Currently Ubuntu Server 23.04 advertises arc support out of the box. You also can't go wrong with Arch, but you'd have to run a recent kernel and not the lts (obviously).

And thanks, the name made sense for a forum like this!

[N3ttX_D]

I'll just buy one and roll with it, worst case it'll get returned Arch is nice but not ideal for server usage (unless you require _whatever_ functionality of it), updating it sometimes just breaks things on my work laptop, so.. btw I use Arch. Bloatbuntu it is then. Once I have it, I'll post some analytics here (love numbers and graphs :3), like how long re-encoding everything to AV1 took, how much space was saved, how is the performance while streaming etc.

[nyanmisaka]

There's anything to worry about unless you're stuck on an older kernel (6.1-). I've been developing on the Arc A380 for almost 10 months now.

[Kenneth Armstrong]

I'm running JF in a Docker container on my Ubuntu 23.04 server (kernel 6.2). I am also using an Arc A750, primarily because I am converting all of my libraries (at least, that which I still have access to the physical media) to AV1. It works great, provided the clients can handle AV1. I had to tweak my Firestick by using Nova Player with the JF app, and my Roku Ultra won't play the AV1 files natively (Roku Ultra reports that it _does_ support AV1, but only if you sideload them via USB. I usually watch most of my stuff at night on my laptop anyway, which has a 13th gen Intel CPU so it handles AV1 natively while using the JF MediaPlayer app. Long story short, some clients work great and some do not. I presume that this will only get better with time as the underlying client hardware vendors increase their AV1 support.

[N3ttX_D]

I'm running JF in a Docker container on my Ubuntu 23.04 server (kernel 6.2). I am also using an Arc A750, primarily because I am converting all of my libraries (at least, that which I still have access to the physical media) to AV1. It works great, provided the clients can handle AV1. I had to tweak my Firestick by using Nova Player with the JF app, and my Roku Ultra won't play the AV1 files natively (Roku Ultra reports that it _does_ support AV1, but only if you sideload them via USB. I usually watch most of my stuff at night on my laptop anyway, which has a 13th gen Intel CPU so it handles AV1 natively while using the JF MediaPlayer app. Long story short, some clients work great and some do not. I presume that this will only get better with time as the underlying client hardware vendors increase their AV1 support.

Wait, Jellyfin won't transcode it on the fly from AV1 if the target device doesn't speak AV1? I mean.. I've streamed AV1 already, it worked just fine on my phone and smart TV that most likely doesn't do AV1, and it worked.. apart from that the CPU was sweating its ass off from the software transcoding and there was a bug in the libdav1d which caused it to OOM my 8GB of RAM after few mins of playback lmao.. Anyway, I thought it transcodes to H.264, or H.265 if you have it enabled (Dashboard/Playback/Hardware Encoding Options)...

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OK nevermind it does transcode (at least from HEVC to .264) lmao, it just is not very obvious to see.

[TheDreadPirate]

Jellyfin will transcode from AV1 to H264/H265. I think Kenneth was saying that a device that, on paper, supports AV1 did not in practice and jellyfin transcoded to something else.

[Kenneth Armstrong]

Jellyfin will transcode from AV1 to H264/H265.  I think Kenneth was saying that a device that, on paper, supports AV1 did not in practice, and jellyfin transcoded to something else.

Yes, sorry, I should have been more clear. Jellyfin will (and does) transcode to something that the player can handle. I was speaking more about the current state of AV1 support as it stands today. But it is getting better!