Intel NUC 13 pro vs Minisforum um790 pro

[Cabaucom376]

My goal is to self host numerous services the only one thats making this decision tough for me is Jellyfin. I will have 3-4 other people with access to 4k movies and want to make sure I have the power to handle them simultaneously just in case (upgrading from a rpi4). I personally find the minisforum option attractive but I see lots of people recommending intel over amd for transcoding reasons. To my limited knowledge comparing the processors specs side by side (Link) it seems that the amd support for AV1 may help with future proofing? Im no expert with videos and the media side of self hosting so I was wanting input on this. Power draw isn't a huge factor but I would kind of like to know what to expect.

[TheDreadPirate]

The NUC 13 does support AV1 decoding. Including 10-bit AV1. I don't think you are able to transcode from AV1 to lower bit rate AV1 with the current version of ffmpeg/Jellyfin anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quic...d_encoding

As for Intel vs AMD transcoding, Intel's QSV has been head and shoulders above AMD, and even Nvidia, in terms of quality per bit-rate for a while. Which is important when transcoding to lower bit rates. Nvidia has caught up quite a bit with RTX 4000. But AMD is just not there yet. To add on to that, driver support in Linux is just better with Intel. No contest.

[bitmap]

For low-end devices, AV1 decoding, as @TheDreadPirate noted is all you can hope for really. And if you're going for something that isn't particularly expandable, Intel at the moment still probably your best bang for the buck on the media server front. Upgrade-wise, an Arc A380 will do AV1 encoding, but you can't do a NUC or similar and expect to utilize hardware like that in the future. I know it's not comparable as it's a new generation i7 but I've been shocked at how well the 13700k performs as a decoder and I've been brute forcing some AV1 encodes with damn good, if not slow results.