Transcoding on a Celeron J1900?

[Zippy1970]

I've been running a Jellyfin server on a rPi 4. This works great on my own tv since it's a new tv that supports just about anything you throw at it. The problems start when I want to watch a movie on another (older) tv and transcoding is required. This makes watching movies impossible (5 seconds transcoding, 1 seconds watching). I was thinking of buying a rPi 5 but quickly decided against it since the rPi 5 still won't do hardware accelerated transcoding. 

But, I can get a used Gigabyte Brix with a J1900 celeron (+4GB RAM and 120GB SSD) for about US$45. I know the J1900 has QuickSync Video, but it's a slower Celeron than for instance the N3550 so I'm not sure that will solve the transcoding problem.

Does anyone have any experience with the J1900?

[tmsrxzar]

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/...tions.html

"Intel® HD Graphics for Intel Atom® Processor Z3700 Series"

A lot of 4K content is going to be HDR.  And Skylake doesn't support 10 bit color.  We recommend Coffeelake (8000 series) as a minimum both because of important codec support and better performance.

i would say not even worth trying based on a recent response on another thread

i would say definitely not since getting drivers for a 10 year old cpu will be nearly impossible, devices get EOL after awhile and so do their drivers

another recommendation, when looking at specs i would highly recommend something that supports DDR4 at minimum, DDR3 is going to be a big performance drop by itself

[TheDreadPirate]

Bay Trail has Quick Sync, but a version that Intel's current drivers no longer support. And the codec support it does have isn't great, even if Intel's drivers supported it. I think the oldest Intel currently supports is Broadwell.

For low power Intel chips, don't get anything older than Apollo Lake.

[BlissSol]

Not sure if any help...
Im running Jellyfin on an old Windows 2016 Server, with an AMD FX-8100 with 16GB DDR3 RAM & a SATA SSD for the OS.
As its a server, it doesn't have monitor, keyboard & mouse attached.
I purchased a Quadro T400 Graphics Card for it (to replace a GT710 Gfx card), and outside of HEVC\AV1 4K video's - the T400 is handling all transcoding for Jellyfin just fine.
(the Server has more than 10+yrs worth of Media stored... so some movies were originally added to the HDD back around the mid 2000's).

My consideration - while knowing i need to upgrade the CPU\MB\RAM in the Server, did i want to build a whole new server at the moment just to add Jellyfin to the Server... or should i just upgrade the Gfx card to something which could handle 'alot' (but not all) transcoding for Jellyfin.

Given i do have a very small handful of 4K 10bit HEVC video's with Dolby Surround Audio (the kind of movies which might be 30+ gig in size) i decided to just upgrade the Gfx card.
I actually use Kodi as a frontend for Jellyfin (most of the time)... so operating like this Jellyfin isn't transcoding.
Jellyfin only transcodes when i VPN back to my house (when im away) & stream thru the browser.

I may be wrong - but if you wanted to be able to hardware transcode literally every format\codec (HEVC, AV1, VP9 etc), then i was under the impression you'd want a GTX 3080 or better (4000 series) Gfx card... and i wasn't about to get one of those for my Server.

Note here - i have a RaspPi 4B in the bedroom running Kodi (with Jellyfin as its backend)... so Jellyfin essentially just metadata.
But yeah.. there's some 1080P H264 (like maybe only 2-3GB sized files) in an MKV container, which the Pi 4 struggles with while the T400 will transcode them perfectly fine.
And obviously - the Pi 4 only supports 4K @ 30Hz.

I'd suggest you build a simple server - with say minimum 8th Gen Core i3, 16GB RAM + say either GTX 1650 or Quadro T400 Gfx minimum
I believe GPU\hardware transcoding is your best bet, but unless the GPU is a model from say the last 2 years - then it wont be able to transcode everything so it then falls back to CPU for software transcoding (which is less efficient).